LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



Shelf UN^^- 



I'- ' 



UNITED STATE.^^F AMERICA. 



9*AiJit>p 



BY TH0MI8 WENTWORTH H1GG1N80N 

♦ 

outdoor papers $1.50 

Atlantic Essays 1.50 

Oldport Days 1.50 

Malbonb: An Oldport Romance 1.50 

Army Life in a Black regiment . . . 1.50 
Young Folks' History op the United 

States, net 1.20 

a larger history op the united states. 

8vo 3.50 

Young Folks' Book op American Ex- 
plorers 1.50 

Common Sense about Women ... 1.50 

Short Studies op American authors . .50 

Margaret puller Ossoli 1.25 

Wendell Phillips : a biographical essay. 

PAPER 25 

The Monarch op Dreams 50 

Hints on Wrtiing and Speech-Making. .50 

special editions 

Common sense about women w. o. t. u. edition 

CLOTH. $1 00 RETAIL 

Short Studies of American Authors, school edition. 

BOARDS. 30 CENTS NET. BY MAIL, 35 CENTS. 



THE NEW WORLD AND 
THE NEW BOOK 

Delivered before the Nineteenth Century Club of New 
York City, Jan. 15, 1891 

WITH KINDBED ESSAYS 



BY 

if 

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 








NOV 6 1391 , 



BOSTON 

LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 

1892 






COPTRIGHT, 1891, BY THOMAS WEXTWORTH HIGQINSON 



All R'tyhts Reserved 



The New World and The New Book 



Typography A^D Electeotypino bt 
C. J. Petebs & Son, Boston. 



PREFACE 



The address which forms the first chapter in 
these pages was given originally before the 
Nineteenth Century Club of New York City 
on January 15, 1891, and was written out 
afterward. Its title was suggested by that of 
a remarkable essay contributed many years ago 
to the Atlantic Monthly, by my friend David 
At wood Wasson and entitled, " The New 
World and the New Man." I am indebted to 
the proprietors of the Century, the Independ- 
ent, the Christian Union, and Harper s Bazar 
for permission to reprint such of the remain- 
ing chapters as appeared in their respective 
columns. 

Nothing is farther from the present writer's 
wish than to pander to any petty national van- 
ity, his sole desire being to assist in creating a 
modest and reasonable self-respect. The civil 
war bequeathed to us Americans, twenty-five 



VI PREFACE 

years ago, a great revival of national feeling ; 
but this has been followed in some quarters, 
during the last few years, by a curious relapse 
into something of the old colonial and apolo- 
getic attitude ; enhanced, no doubt, by the 
vexations and humiliations of the long struggle 
for international copyright. Tliis is the frame 
of mind which is deprecated in this volume, 
because it is the last source from which any 
strong or self-reliant literary work can proceed. 
In the words of Thoreau, " I do not propose to 
Avrite an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily 
as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his 
roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." 

Cambridge, Mass., October 1, 1891. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. The New World and the New Book . 1 

II. An American Temper ament .... 19 

III. The Shadow of Europe 27 

IV. On Taking Ourselves Seriously . . 35 
V. A Cosmopolitan Standard .... 43 

VI. A Contemporaneous Posterity ... 51 

VII. On Literary Tonics 62 

VIII. The Fear of the Dead Levkl ... 70 

IX. Do We need a Literary Centre? . 77 

X. The Equation of Fame 88 

XL Concerning High-water Marks . . 97 

XII. Personal Ideals 106 

XIII. On the Need of a Background . . 113 

XIV. Unnecessary Apologies 120 

XV. The Perils of American Humor . . 128 

XVI. On the Proposed Abolition of the 

Plot 135 

XVII. American Translators 144 

XVIII. The Westminster Abbey of a Book 

Catalogue 152 

XIX. Town and Gown 161 

XX. " Make Thy Option Which of Two " . 170 
vii 



Vlll 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

XXI. The Decline of the Sentimental . 178 

XXII. CONCEKNING GlANTS 185 

XXIII. Weapons of Precision 192 

XXIV. The Test of the Dime Novel ... 198 
XXV. The Thick of Self-depeeciation . . 206 

XXVI. The Literary Pendulum 213 

XXVII. The Evolution of an American . . 221 

XXVIII. A World-literature 228 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE 
NEW BOOK 



[An Address delivered before the " Nineteenth 
Century Club," January 15, 1891.] 



T T is a remarkable fact that the man who lias, 
among all American authors, made the most 
daring and almost revolutionary claims in 
behalf of American literature should yet have 
been, among all these authors, the most equable 
in temperament and the most cosmopolitan in 
training. 

Washington Irving was, as one may say, 
born a citizen of the world, for he was born 
in New York City. He was not a rustic nor 
a Puritan, nor even, in the American sense, a 
Yankee. He spent twenty-one years of his life 
in foreign countries. He was mistaken in 
England for an English writer. He was 
accepted as an adopted Spaniard in Spain. He 
1 



1 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

died before the outbreak of the great Civil 
War, which did so much to convince us, for a 
time at least, that we were a nation. Yet it 
was Washington Irving who wrote to John 
Lothrop Motley, in 1857, two years before his 
own death : — 

" You are properly sensible of the high call- 
ing of the American press, that rising tribunal 
before which the history of all nations is to be 
revised and rewritten, and the judgment of past 
ages to be corrected or confirmed." ^ 

The utmost claim of the most impassioned 
Fourth of July orator has never involved any 
declaration of literary independence to be com- 
pared with this deliberate utterance of the 
placid and world-experienced Irving. It was 
the fashion of earlier critics to pity him for hav- 
ing been born into a country without a past. 
This passage showed him to have rejoiced in 
being born into a country with a future. His 
" broad and eclectic genius," as Warner well 
calls it, was surely not given to bragging or 
to vagueness. He must have meant something 
by this daring statement. What did he mean ? 

1 July 17, 1857. ^Motley Correspondence, i. 203. 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 3 

There are some things which it is very cer- 
tain that he did not mean. He certainly did 
not accept the Matthew Arnold attitude, that to 
talk of a distinctive American press at all is an 
absurdity. Arnold finds material for profound 
ridicule in the fact that there exists a " Primer 
of American Literature ; " this poor little Cin- 
derella, cut off from all schooling, must not 
even have a primer of her own. Irving cer- 
tainly did not assume the Goldwin Smith atti- 
tude, that this nation is itself but a schism, and 
should be viewed accordingly ; as if one should 
talk of there being only a schism between an 
oak-tree and its seedling, and should try to 
correct the unhappy separation by trowel and 
gardener's wax. He certainly did not accept 
the theory sometimes so earnestly advocated 
among us, of a " cosmopolitan tribunal," which 
always turns out to mean a tribunal where all 
other nations are to be admitted to the jury-box, 
while America is to get no farther than the 
prisoners' dock. Irving would have made as 
short work with such a cosmopolitan tribunal 
as did Alice in Wonderland with the jury-box 
of small quadrupeds, when she refused to obey 



4 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

the king's order that all persons over a mile 
high should leave the court-room. In truth, 
the tone of Irving's remark carries us back, by 
its audacious self-reliance, to the answer said to 
have been given bj^ the Delphic oracle to 
Cicero in his youth. It told him, according 
to Plutarch, to live for himself, and not to take 
the opinions of others for his guide ; and the 
German Niebulir thinks that " if the answer was 
really given, it might well tempt us to believe in 
the actual inspiration of the priestess," ^ 

At any rate, Irving must have meant some- 
thing by the remark. What could he have 
meant? What is this touchstone that the 
American press must apply to the history and 
the thought of the world? The touchstone, I 
should unhesitatingl}^ I'eply, of the Declaration 
of Independence ; or rather, perhaps, of those 
five opening words into which the essence of the 
Declaration of Independence was concentrated ; 
the five words within which, as Lincoln said, 
Jefferson embodied an eternal truth. " All 
men are created equal;'' — that is, equally 
men, and each entitled to be counted and con- 
sidered as an iiidividual. 

1 Hist, of Rome, tr. by Scliinitz, v. 35. 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 5 

From this simple assumption flowed all that 
is distinctive in American society. From it 
resulted, as a political inference, universal suf- 
frage ; that is, a suffrage constantly tending to 
be universal, although it still leaves out one- 
half the human race. This universal suffrage 
is inevitably based on the doctrine of human 
equality, as further interpreted by Franklin's 
remark that the poor man has an equal right to 
the suffrage with the rich man, '' and more 
need," because he has fewer ways in which to 
protect himself. But it is not true, as even 
such acute European observers as M. Scherer 
and Sir Henry Maine assume, that " democ- 
racy is but a form of government; " for democ- 
racy has just as distinct a place in society, 
and, above all, in the realm of literature. The 
touchstone there applied is just the same, and 
it consists in the essential dignity and value of 
the individual man. The distinctive attitude 
of the American press must lie, if anywhere, in 
its recognition of this individual importance 
and worth. 

The five words of Jefferson — words which 
Matthew Arnold pronounced " not solid," thus 



6 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

prove themselves solid enough to sustain not 
merely the government of sixty-three million 
people, but their literature. Instead of avoid- 
ing, with Goethe, the common, das Gretneinde, 
American literature must freely seek the com- 
mon ; its fiction must record not queens and 
Cleopatras alone, but the emotion in the heart 
of the schoolgirl and the sempstress : its his- 
tory must record, not great generals alone, but 
the nameless boys whose graves people with un- 
dying memories every soldiers' cemetery from 
Arlington to Chattanooga. 

And Motley the pupil was not unworthy of 
Irving from whom the suggestion came. His 
" Dutch Republic " was written in this Amer- 
ican spirit. William the Silent remains in our 
memorj' as no more essentially a hei'o than John 
Haring, who held single-handed his submerged 
dike against an army : and Philip of Burgundy 
and his knights of the Golden Fleece are 
painted as far less important than John Coster, 
the Antwerp apothecary, printing his little 
grammar with movable types. Motley wrote 
from England, in the midst of an intoxicating 
social success, that he never should wish America 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 7 

" to be Anglicized in the aristocratic sense " of 
the term ; ^ and he described the beautiful 
English country-seats as "paradises very per- 
verting to the moral and politico-economical 
sense," and sure to " pass away, one of these 
centuries, in the general progress of humanity." ^ 
And he afterwards said the profoundest thing 
ever uttered in regard to our Civil War, when 
he said that it was not, in the ordinary sense, " a 
military war," but a contest of two principles.^ 
Wendell Phillips once told me that as the anti- 
slavery contest made him an American, so 
Europe made Motley one ; and when the two 
young aristocrats met after years of absence, 
they both found that they had thus experienced 
religion. 

When we pass to other great American 
authors, we see that Emerson lifted his voice 
and spoke even to the humblest of the people 
of the intrinsic dignity of man : — 

God said, I am tired of kings, 

I suffer them uo more ; 
Up to my ear each morning brings 

The outrage of the poor. 

1 Corresp. ii. 294. 2 jud. ii. 280. 3 Ibid. ii. 82. 



8 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

I will have never a noble, 

No lineage counted great; 
Fishers and choppers and ploughmen 

Shall constitute a State. 

To-day unbind the captive, 

So only are ye unbound : 
Lift up a people from the dust, 

Trump of their freedom, sound ! 

Pay ransom to the owner. 

And fill the bag to the brim : 
Who is the owner ? The slave is owner. 

And ever was. Pay him. 

That poem was not written for a few culti- 
vated people only. I heard it read to an armed 
regiment of freed slaves, standing silent with 
dusky faces, with the solemn arches of the live 
oaks above them, each tree draped with long 
festoons of gray moss across its hundred feet of 
shade. And never reader had an audience more 
serious, more thoughtful. The words which to 
others are literature, to them were life. 

And all of that early transcendental school 
which did so much to emancipate and national- 
ize American literature, did it by recognizing 
this same fact. From the depth of their so-called 
idealism they recognized the infinite value of 



THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW BOOK 9 

the individual man. Tlioreaii, who has been so 
incorrectly and even cruelly described as a man 
who spurned his fellows, wrote that noble 
sentence, forever refuting such critics, " What is 
nature, without a liuman life passing within 
her? Many jo3's and many sorrows are the 
liofhts and shadows in which she shines most 
beautiful." Hawthorne came nearest to a 
portrayal of himself in that exquisite prose- 
poem of "■ The Threefold Destiny," in wliich the 
world-weary man returns to his native village 
and finds all his early dreams fulfilled in the life 
beside his own hearthstone. Margaret Fuller 
Ossoli wrote the profoundest phrase of criticism 
which has yet proceeded from any American 
critic, when she said that in a work of fiction 
we need to hear the excuses that men make to 
themselves for their worthlessness. 

And now that this early ideal movement has 
passed by, the far wider movement which is 
estal)lislung American fiction, not in one local- 
ity alone, but on a field broad as the continent, 
unconsciously recognizes this one principle, — 
the essential dio-nitv and worth of the Individ- 
ual man. This is what enables it to dispense 



10 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

with the toy of royalty and the mechanism of 
separate classes, and to reach human nature 
itself. When we look at the masters of English 
fiction, Scott and Jane Austen, we notice that 
in scarcely one of their novels does one person 
ever swerve on the closing page from the precise 
social position he has held from- the beginning. 
Society in their hands is fixed, not fluid. Of 
course, there are a few concealed heirs, a few 
revealed strawberry leaves, but never any essen- 
tial change. I can recall no I'eal social promo- 
tion in all the Waverley novels except where 
Halbert Glendinning weds the maid of Avenel, 
and there the tutelary genius disappears 
singing, — 

" The churl is lord, the maid is bride," — 

and it proved necessary for Scott to write a 
sequel, explaining that the marriage was on the 
whole a rather unhappy one, and that luckily 
they had no children. Not that Scott did not 
appreciate with the keenest zest his own 
Jeannie Deanses and Dandie Dinmonts, but they 
must keep their place ; it is not human nature 
they vindicate, but peasant virtues. 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 11 

But from the moment American fiction came 
upon the scene, it brought a change. Peasant 
virtue vanishes when the peasant is a possible 
president, and what takes its place is individual 
manhood, irrespective of social position. The 
heroes who successively conquered Europe in 
the hands of American authors were of low 
estate. — a backwoodsman, a pilot, a negro slave, 
a lamplighter ; to which gallery Bret Harte 
added the gambler, and the authors of " Democ- 
racy " and the " Bread-Winners " flung in the 
politician. In all these figures social distinc- 
tions disappear: "a man's a man for a' that." 
And so of our later writers. Miss Wilkins in 
New England, Miss Murfree in Tennessee, Mr. 
Cable in Louisiana, Mr. Howe in Kansas, Dr. 
Eggleston in Indiana, Julien Gordon in New 
York, all represent the same impulse ; all recog- 
nize that " all men are created equal " in Jeffer- 
son's sense, because all recognize the essential 
and inalienable value of the individual man. 

It would be, of course, absurd to claim that 
America represents the whole of this tendency, 
for the tendency is a part of that wave of demo- 
cratic feeling which is overflowing the world. 



12 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

But Dickens, who initiated the movement in 
English fiction, was unquestionably influenced 
by that very American life which he disliked 
and caricatured, and we have since seen a simi- 
lar impulse spread through other countries. In 
the Russian, the Norwegian, the Sj)anish, the 
Italian fiction, we now rarely find a plot turning 
on some merely conventional difference between 
the social positions of hero and heroine. In 
England the change has been made more slowly 
than elsewhere, so incongruous is it in the midst 
of a society which still, in the phrase of Brander 
Matthews, accepts dukes. Indeed, it is curious 
to observe that for a time it was still found 
necessary, in the earlier stages of the transition, 
to label the hero with his precise social posi- 
tion; — as, " Steven Lawrence, Yeoman," " John 
Halifax, Gentleman," — whereas in America it 
would have been left for the reader to find out 
whether John Halifax was or was not a gentle- 
man, and no label would have been thought 
needful. 

And I hasten to add, what I should not always 
have felt justified in saying, that this Amer- 
ican tendency comes to its highest point and is 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 13 

best indicated in the later work of Mr. Howells. 
Happy is that author whose final admirers are, 
as heroes used to say, •• the captives of his bow 
and spear," the men from whom he met his ear- 
lier criticism. Happ}^ is that man who has the 
patience to follow, like Cicero, his own genius, 
and not to take the opinions of others for his 
guide. And the earlier work of Mr. Howells 
— that is, everything before '' The Rise of Silas 
Lapham," " Annie Kilburn," and " The Hazard 
of New Fortunes " — falls now into its right 
place ; its alleged thinness becomes merely that 
of the painter's sketches and studies before his 
maturer work begins. As the Emperor Alaric 
felt always an unseen power drawing him on to 
Rome, so Howells has evidently felt a magnet 
drawing him on to New York, and it was not 
until he set up his canvas there that it had due 
proportions. My friend Mr. James Parton used 
to say that students must live in New England, 
where there were better libraries, but that 
" loafers and men of genius '" should live in New 
York. To me j)ersonally it seems a high price 
to pay for the privileges either of genius or of 
loafing, but it is well that Howells has at last 



14 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

paid it for the sake of the results. It is impos- 
sible to deny that he as a critic has proved him- 
self sometimes narrow, and has rejected with 
too great vehemence that which lay outside of 
his especial domain. It is not necessary, be- 
cause one prefers apples, to condemn oranges ; 
and he has sometimes needed the caution of the 
old judge to the young one : " Beware how 3'ou 
give reasons for your decisions ; for, while your 
decisions will usually be right, your reasons will 
very often be wrong." But as he has become 
touched more and more with the enthusiasm of 
humanity, he has grown better than his reasons, 
far better than his criticisms : and it is with 
him and with the school he represents that the 
hope of American literature just now rests. The 
reason why he finds no delicate shading or gra- 
dation of character unimportant is that he rep- 
resents the dignity and importance of the 
individual man. 

When the future literary historian of the 
English-speaking world looks back to this 
period he will be compelled to say, " While 
England hailed as great writing and significant 
additions to literature the brutalities of Haggard 



THE NEW WOELD AND THE NEW BOOK 15^ 

and the garlic flavors of Kipling, there was in 
America a student of life, who painted with the 
skill that Scott revered in Miss Austen, but not 
on the two inches of ivory that Miss Austen 
chose. He painted on a canvas large enough 
for the tragedies of New York, large enough 
for the future of America. Rich and luminous 
as George Eliot, he had the sense of form and 
symmetry which she had not ; graphic in his 
characterization as Hardy, he did not stop, like 
Hardy, with a single circle of villagers. What 
the future critic will say, we too should be 
ready to perceive. If England finds him tire- 
some, so much the worse for England ; if Eng- 
land prefers dime novels and cut-and-thrust 
Christmas melodramas, and finds in what 
Howells writes only " transatlantic kickshaws " 
because he paints character and life, we must 
say, as our fathers did, " Farewell, dear Eng- 
land," and seek what is our own. Emerson set 
free our poetry, our prose ; Howells is setting 
free our fiction ; he himself is as yet only half 
out of the chrysalis, but the wings are there. 

It must always be remembered that in litera- 
ture, alone of all arts, place is of secondary im- 



16 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

portance, for its masterpieces can be carried 
round the world in one's pockets. We need to 
go to Europe to see the great galleries, to hear 
the music of Wagner, but the boy who reads 
^schylus and Horace and Shakespeare by his 
pine-knot fire has at his command the essence 
of all universities, so far as literary training 
goes. But were this otherwise, we must 
remember that libraries, galleries, and buildings 
are all secondary to that great human life of 
which they are only the secretions or appen- 
dages. " My Madonnas " — thus wrote to me 
that recluse woman of genius, Emily Dickinson 
— " are the women who pass my house to their 
work, bearing Saviours in their arms." Words 
wait on thoughts, thoughts on life ; and after 
these, technical training is an easy thing. 
'• The ai't of composition,'" wrote Thoreau, " is 
as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, 
and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater 
force behind them." What are the two urnnis- 
takable rifle-shots in American literature thus 
far? John Brown's speech in the court-room 
and Lincoln's Gettysburg address. 

Yielding to no one in the desire to see our 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 17 

land tilled with libraries, with galleries, with 
museums, with fine buildings, I must still main- 
tain that all those things are secondary to that 
vio-orous American life, which is destined to 
assimilate and digest them all. We are still in 
allegiance to Europe for a thousand things; 
— clothes, art, scholarship. For many years we 
must yet go to Europe as did Robinson Crusoe 
to his wreck, for the very materials of living. 
But materials take their value from him who 
uses them, and that wreck would have long 
since passed from memory had there not been 
a Robinson Crusoe. I am willing to be cen- 
sured for too much national self-confidence, for 
it is still true that we, like the young Cicero, 
need that quality. Goethe's world-literature is, 
no doubt, the ultimate aim, but a strong national 
literature must come first. The new book must 
express the spirit of the New World. We need 
some repressing, no doubt, and every European 
newspaper is free to apply it; we listen with 
exemplary meekness to every little European 
lecturer who comes to enlighten us, in words of 
one syllable, as to what we knew very well 
before. We need something of repression, but 



18 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

much more of stimulus. So Spenser's Brito- 
mart, when she entered the enchanted hall, 
found above four doors in succession the 
inscription, " Be bold ! be bold ! be bold ! be 
bold!" and only over the fifth door was the 
inscription, needful but wholly subordinate, 
" Be not too bold ! " 



AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT 19 

II 

AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT 

n^HE recent assertion of the London corre- 
spondent of the New York Tribune, that 
Englishmen like every American to be an Amer- 
ican, has a cnrious interest in connection with 
some remarks of the late Matthew Arnold, which 
seem to look in an opposite direction. Lord 
Houghton once told me that the earlier Ameri- 
can guests in London society were often cen- 
sured as being too English in appearance and 
manner, and as wanting in a distinctive flavor 
of Americanism. He instanced Ticknor and 
Sumner ; and we can all remember that there 
were at first similar criticisms on Lowell. It is 
indeed a form of comment to which all Ameri- 
cans are subject in England, if they have the 
ill-luck to have color in their cheeks and not to 
speak very much through their noses ; in that 
case they are apt to pass for Englishmen by no 
wish of their own, and to be suspected of a little 
double dealing when they hasten to reveal their 



20 THE NEW WOELD AND THE NEW BOOK 

birthplace. It very often turns out that the 
demand for a distinctive Americanism really 
seeks only the external peculiarities that made 
Joaquin Miller and Buffalo Bill popular ; an 
Americanism that can at any moment be anni- 
hilated by a pair of scissors. It is something, 
no doubt, to be allowed even such an amount 
of nationality as this ; and Washington Irving 
attributed the English curiosity about him to 
the fact that he held a quill in his fingers instead 
of sticking it in his hair, as was expected. 

But it would seem that Mr. Arnold, on the 
other hand, disapproved the attempt to set up 
any claim whatever to a distinctive American 
temperament; and he has twice held up one 
of our own authors for reprobation as having 
asserted that the American is, on the whole, of 
lighter build and has " a drop more of nervous 
fluid " than the Englishman. This is not the 
way, he thinks, in which a serious literature is 
to be formed. But it turns out that the im- 
mediate object of the writer of the objection- 
able remark was not to found a literature, but 
simply to utter a physiological caution : the 
object of the essay in which it occurs — one 



AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT 21 

called " The Murder of the Innocents," ^ being 
simply to caution this more nervous race against 
overworking tlieir children in school ; an aim 
which was certainly as far as possible from what 
Mr. Arnold calls '•'tall talk and self-glorification." 
If a nation is not to be saved by pointing 
out is own physiological perils, what is to 
save it? 

As a matter of fact, it will be generally 
claimed by Americans, I fancy, that whatever 
else their much-discussed nation may have, it 
has at least developed a temperament for itself; 
"an ill-favored thing, but mine own," as Touch- 
stone says of Audrey. There is no vanity or 
self-assertion involved in this, any more than 
when a person of blond complexion claims not 
to be a brunette or a brunette meekly insists 
upon not being regarded as fair-haired. If the 
American is expected to be in all respects the 
duplicate of the Englishman, and is only charged 
with inexpressible inferiority in quality and 
size, let us know it ; but if two hundred and 
fifty years of transplantation under a new sky 
and in new conditions have made any difference 
1 Out-Door Papers, p. 104. 



22 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

in the type, let us know that also. In truth, 
the difference is already so marked that Mr. 
Arnold himself concedes it at every step in 
his argument, and has indeed stated it in very 
much the same terms which an American would 
have employed. In a paper entitled " From 
Easter to August," ^ he says frankly : " Our 
countrymen [namely, the English], with a thou- 
sand good qualities, are really perhaps a good 
deal wanting in lucidity and flexibility ; " and 
again in the same essa}^ : " The whole American 
nation may be called intelligent; that is, quick." 
This would seem to be conceding the very point 
at issue between himself and the American 
writer whom he is criticising. 

The same difference of temperament, in the 
direction of a greater quickness — what the wit 
of Edmund Quincy once designated as " specific 
levity " — on the part of Americans is certainly 
very apparent to every one of us who visits 
England ; and not infrequently makes itself 
perceptible, even without a surgical operation, 
to our English visitors. Professor Tyndall is 
reported to have said — and if he did not say it, 
1 Nineteenth Century for September, 1887. 



AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT 23 

some one else pointed it out for him — that, 
whereas in his London scientific lectures he 
always had to repeat his explanations three 
times ; first telling his audience in advance 
what his experiments were to accomplish, then 
during the process explaining what was being 
accomplished, and then at last recapitulating 
what had actually been done ; he found it best, 
in America, to omit one, if not two, of these 
expositions. In much the same way, the director 
of a company of English comedians complained 
to a friend of mine that American audiences 
laughed a great deal too soon for them, and took 
the joke long before it was properly elucidated. 
In the same way an American author, who had 
formerly been connected with the St. Nicholas 
magazine, was told by a London publisher that 
the plan of it was all wrong. " These pages of 
riddles at the end, for instance : no child would 
ever guess them." And though the American 
assured him that they were guessed regularly 
every month in twenty thousand families, the 
Englishmen still shook his head. Certainly the 
difference between the national temperament 
will be doubted by no American public speaker 



24 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

in England who has had one of his hearers call 
upon him the next morning to express satis- 
faction in the clever anecdote which it had taken 
his English auditor a night's meditation to com- 
prehend. 

It is impossible to overrate the value, in 
developing an independent national feeling in 
America, of the prolonged series of leather un- 
amiable criticisms that have proceeded from the 
English press and public men since the days of 
Mrs. Trollope and down to our own day. It has 
de-colonized us ; and all the long agony of the 
Civil War, when all the privileged classes in 
England, after denouncing us through long- 
years for tolerating slavery, turned and de- 
nounced us yet more bitterly for abolishing it 
at the cost of our own heart's blood, onlj^ com- 
pleted the emancipation. The way out of pro- 
vincialism is to be frankl}' and even brutally 
criticised; we thus learn not merely to see our 
own faults, which is comparatively easy, but to 
put our own measure on the very authority that 
condemns us : voir le monde, cest juger les 
juges. We thus learn to trust our own tem- 
perament ; to create our own methods ; or, at 



AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT 25 

least, to select our own teachers. At this 
moment we go to France for our art and to 
Germany for our science as completely as if 
there were no such nation as England in the 
world. In literature the tie is far closer with 
what used to be called the mother country, and 
this because of the identity of language. All 
retrospective English literature — that is, all 
literature more than a century or two old — is 
common to the two countries. All contemporary 
literature cannot yet be judged, because it is 
contemporary. The time may come when not 
a line of current English poetry may remain 
except the four quatrains hung up in St. Marga- 
ret's Church, and when the Matthew Arnold 
of Macaulay's imaginary New Zealand may 
find with surprise that Whittier and Lowell 
produced something more worthy of that acci- 
dental immortality than Browning or Tenny- 
son. The time may come when a careful study 
of even the despised American newspapers may 
reveal them to have been in one respect nearer 
to a high civilization than any of their Euro- 
pean compeers ; since the leading American 
literary journals criticise their own contributors 



26 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

with the utmost freedom, while there does not 
seem to be a journal in London or Paris that 
even attempts that courageous candor. To 
dwell merely on the faults and follies of a 
nascent nation is idle ; vitality is always hope- 
ful. To complain that a nation's very strength 
carries with it plenty of follies and excesses is, 
as Joubert says, to ask for a breeze that shall 
have the attribute of not blowing; demander 
du vent qui nait point de mohilite. 



THE SHADOW OF EUEOPE 27 

III 

THE SHADOW OF EUROPE 

TTTHEN the first ocean steamers crossed the 
Atlantic, about 1838, Willis predicted 
that they would only make American literature 
more provincial, by bringing Europe so much 
nearer than before. Yet Emerson showed that 
there was an influence at work more potent than 
steamers, and the colonial spirit in our literature 
began to diminish from his time. In the days 
of those first ocean voyages, the favorite literary 
journal of cultivated Americans was the New 
York Albion, which was conducted expressly 
for English residents on this continent ; and it 
was considered a piece of American audacity 
when Horace Greeley called Margaret Fuller to 
New York, that the Tribune might give to our 
literature an organ of its own. Later, on the 
establishment of Putnam's Magazine, in 1853, I 
remember that one of the most enlightened New 
York journalists predicted to me the absolute 
failure of the whole enterprise. " Either an 



28 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

American magazine will command no respect," 
he said, " or it must be better than Blackwood 
or Fraser, which is an absurd supposition." 
But either of our great illustrated magazines 
has now more readers in England than Fraser 
or Blackwood had then in America ; and to this 
extent Willis's prediction is unfulfilled, and the 
shadow of Europe is lifted, not deepened, over 
our literature. But in many ways the glamour 
of foreign superiority still holds ; and we still 
see much of the old deferential attitude prevail- 
ing. Prince Albert said of German}^, in 1859, 
that its rock ahead was self-sufficiency. In our 
own country, as to literature and science, to say 
nothing of art, our rock ahead is not self-suffi- 
ciency, but self-depreciation. Men still smile 
at the Congressman who said, " What have we 
to do with Europe ? " but I sometimes wish, for 
the credit of the craft, that it had been a literary 
man who said it. After all, it was only a 
rougher paraphrase of Napoleon's equally trench- 
ant words : " Cette vieille Europe m''ennuie.^^ 

The young American who goes to London, 
and finds there the most agreeable literary 
societv in the world, because the most central- 



THE SHADOW OF EUROPE 29 

ized and compact, can hardly believe at first 
that the authors around him are made of the 
same clay with those whom he has often jostled 
on the sidewalk at home. He finds himself 
dividing his scanty hours between celebrated 
writers on the one side, and great historic 
remains on the other; as I can remember, one 
day, to have weighed a visit to Darwin against 
one to York Minster, and later to have post- 
poned Stonehenge, which seemed likely to 
endure, for Tennyson, who perhaps might not. 
The young American sees in London, to quote 
Willis again, " whole shelves of his library 
walking about in coats and gowns," and they 
seem for the moment far more interesting than 
the similar shelves in home-made garments 
behind him. He is not cured until he is some 
day startled with the discovery that there are 
cultivated foreigners to whom his own world is 
foreign, and therefore fascinating ; men who 
think the better of him for having known Mark 
Twain, and women who are unwearied in their 
curiosity about the personal ways of Longfel- 
low. Nay, when I once mentioned to that fine 
old Irish gentleman, the late Richard D. Webb, 



30 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

at his house in Dublin, that I had felt a thrill 
of pleasure on observing the street sign, denot- 
ing Fishamble Lane, at Cork, and recalling the 
ballad about "Misthress Judy McCarty, of 
Fishamble Lane," he pleased me hy saying that 
he had felt just so in New York, when he saw 
the name of Madison Square, and thought of 
Miss Flora McFlimsey. So our modest conti- 
nent had already its storied heroines and its 
hallowed ground ! 

There are, undoubtedly, points in which 
Europe, and especially England, has still the 
advantage of America; such, for instance, as 
weekly journalism. In regard to printed books 
there is also still an advantage in quantity, but 
not in quality ; while in magazine literature the 
balance seems to incline just now the other 
way. I saw it claimed confidently, not long 
since, that the English magazines had " more 
solid value " than our own ; but this solidity now 
consists, I should say, more in the style than in 
the matter, and is a doubtful benefit, like solid- 
ity in a pudding. When the writer whom I 
quote went on to cite the saying of a young 
girl, that she could always understand an 



THE SHADOW OF EUIIOPE 31 

American periodical, but never opened an 
English one without something unintelligible, it 
seemed to me a bit of evidence whose bearing 
was quite uncertain. It reminded me of a 
delightful old lady, well known to me, who, 
when taxed by her daughter with reading a book 
quite beyond her comprehension, replied: "But 
where is the use of reading a book that you can 
understand? It does you no good." As a 
matter of fact, the English magazines are 
commonly not magazines at all, in the American 
sense. Mr. M. D. Conway well said that the 
Contemporary Revietv and the Fortnightly were 
simply circular letters addressed by a few culti- 
vated gentlemen to those belonging to the same 
club. It is not until a man knows himself to 
be writing for a hundred thousand readers that 
he is compelled to work out his abstrusest 
thought into clearness, just as a sufficient pres- 
sure transforms opaque snow into pellucid ice. 
In our great American magazines, history and 
science have commonly undergone this process, 
and the reader may be gratified, not ashamed, 
at comprehending them. 

The best remedy for too profound a deference 



82 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

toward European literary work is to test the 
author on some ground with which we in Amer- 
ica cannot help being familiar. It is this which 
makes a book of travels among us, or even a 
lecturing trip, so perilous for a foreign reputa- 
tion ; and among the few who can bear this test 
— as De Tocqueville, Von Hoist, the Comte de 
Paris — it is singularly rare to find an English- 
man. If the travellers liave been thus unfortu- 
nate, how much more those who have risked 
themselves on cis-Atlantic themes without trav- 
elling. No living English writer stood higher 
in America than Sir Henry Maine until we 
watched him as he made the perilous transition 
from " Ancient Law " to modern " Popular 
Government," and saw him approaching what 
he himself admits to be the most important theme 
in modern history, with apparently but some half- 
dozen authorities to draw upon, — the United 
States Constitution, the Federalist, and two or 
three short biographies. Had an American writ- 
ten on the most unimportant period of the most 
insignificant German principality with a basis of 
reading no larger, we should have wished that 
his nationality had been kept a secret. It is 



THE SHADOW OP EUROPE 33 

not strange, on such a method, tnat Maine 
should inform us that the majority of the pres- 
ent State sfovernments were formed before the 
Union, and that only half the original thirteen 
colonies held slaves. So Mr. John A. Doyle, 
writing an extended history of American coloni- 
zation, put into his first volume a map making 
the lines of all the early grants run north and 
south instead of east and west ; and this having 
been received with polite incredulity, gave us 
another map depicting the New England colo- 
nies in 1700, with Plymouth still delineated as a 
separate government, although it had been 
united with Massachusetts eight years before. 
When a lady in a London drawing-room 
sends, by a returning New Yorker, an urgent 
message to her cousin at Coloi-ado Springs, we 
rather enjoy it, and call it only pretty Fanny's 
way ; she is not more ignorant of North Ameri- 
can geography than we ourselves may be of that 
of South America. But when we find that 
English scholars of established reputation be- 
tray, when on ground we know, defects of 
method that seem hopeless, what reverence is 
left for those who keep on ground that we do 



34 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

not know? In time, the shadow of Europe 
must lose something of its impressiveness. Dr. 
Creighton, in his preface to the English " His- 
torical Review," counts in all Americans as 
merely so many " outlying English ; " but it is 
time to recognize that American literature is 
not, and never again can be, merely an outlying 
portion of the literature of England. 



ON TAKING OURSELVES SERIOUSLY 35 

IV 

ON TAKING OURSELVES SERIOUSLY 

rpOLSTOi says, in " Anna Kar^nina," that no 
nation will ever come to anything- unless it 
attaches some importance to itself. (^Les seules 
nations qui aient de Vavenh\ les seules qu'on 
puisse nommer historiques, sont celles qui sentent 
V importance et le valeur de leur institutions.} 
It is curious that ours seems to be the only con- 
temporary nation which is denied this simple 
privilege of taking itself seriously. What is 
criticised in us is not so much that our social 
life is inadequate, as that we find it worth study- 
ing ; not so much that our literature is insufh- 
cient, as that we think it, in Matthew Arnold's 
disdainful phrase, " important." In short, we 
are denied not merely the pleasure of being at- 
tractive to other people, which can easily be 
spared, but the privilege that is usually con- 
ceded to the humblest, of being of some inter- 
est to ourselves. 

The bad results of this are very plain. They 



36 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

are, indeed, so great that the evils which were 
supposed to come to our literature, for instance, 
from the absence of international copyright, 
seem trivial in comparison. The very persons 
who are working the hardest to elevate our civ- 
ilization are constantly called from their duties, 
and, what is worse, are kept in a constant state 
of subdued exasperation, by the denial of their 
very right to do these duties. "My work," 
says Emerson, " may be of no impoi'tance, but I 
must not think it of no importance if I would 
do it well." Those of us who toiled for years 
to remove from this nation the stain of slavery, 
remember how, when the best blood of our kin- 
dred was lavished to complete the sacrifice, all 
the intellectual society of England turned upon 
us and reproached us for the deed. " The great- 
est war of principle which has been waged in this 
generation," wrote Motley in one of his letters, 
" was of no more interest to her, except as it bore 
upon the cotton question, than the wretched little 
squabbles of Mexico or South America." ^ And 
so those Americans who are spending their lives in 
the effort to remove the very defects visible in our 

1 Letters, I., 373. 



ON TAKING OURSELVES SERIOUSLY 87 

letters, our arts, our literature, are met con- 
stantly by the insolent assumption, not that 
these drawbacks exist, but that they are not 
worth removing. 

How magnificent, for instance, is the work con- 
stantly done among us, by private and public 
munificence, in the support of our libraries and 
schools. Carlyle, in one of his early journals, de- 
plores that while every village around liim has its 
place to lock up criminals, not one has a public 
library. In the State of Massachusetts this 
condition of things is coming to be reversed, 
since many villages have no jail, and free libra- 
ries will soon be universal. The writer is at this 
moment one of the trustees of three admirable 
donations just given b}^ a young man not thirty- 
five to the city of his birth, — a city hall, a pub- 
lic library, and a manual training school. He 
is not a man of large fortune, as fortunes go, 
and his personal expenditures are on a very 
modest scale ; he keeps neither yachts nor race- 
horses ; his name never appears in the lists of 
fashionables, summer or winter ; but he simply 
does his duty to American civilization in this 
wav. There are multitudes of others, all over 



38 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

the land, who do the same sort of thing ; they 
are the most essentially indigenous and Ameri- 
can type we have, and their strength is in this, 
that they find their standard of action not 
abroad, but at home ; they take their nation 
seriously. Yet this, which should be the thing 
that most appeals to every foreign observer, is, 
on the contrary, the very thing which the aver- 
age foreign observer finds most offensive. " Do 
not tell me only," says Matthew Arnold, 
'^ ... of the great and growing number of 
your churches and schools, libraries and news- 
papers ; tell me also if your civilization — which 
is the grand name you give to all this develop- 
ment — tell me if your civilization is interest- 
ing:' 

Set aside the fact of transfer across an ocean ; 
set aside the spectacle of a self-governing peo- 
ple; if there is no interest in the spectacle of 
a nation of sixty million people laboring with 
all its might to acquire the means and resources 
of civilized life, then there is nothing interest- 
ing on earth. A hundred years hence, the 
wonder will be, not that we Americans attached 
so much importance, at this stage, to these 



ON TAKING OUESELVES SERIOUSLY 39 

efforts of ours, but that even we appreciated 
their importance so little. If the calculations 
of Canon Zincke are correct, in his celebrated 
pamphlet, the civilization which we are organ- 
izing is the great civilization of the future. He 
computes that in 1980 the English-speaking 
population of the globe will be, at the present 
rate of progress, one billion ; and that of this 
number, eight hundred million will dwell in the 
United States. Now, all the interest we take 
in our schools, colleges, libraries, galleries, is 
but preliminary work in founding this great 
future civilization. Toils and sacrifices for this 
end may be compared, as Longfellow compares 
the secret studies of an author, to the sub- 
merged piers of a bridge : they are out of sight, 
but without them no structure can endure. If 
American society is really unimportant, and is 
foredoomed to fail, all these efforts will go with 
it ; but if it has a chance of success, these are 
to be its foundations. If they are to be laid, 
they must be laid seriously. " No man can do 
anything well," says Emerson, " who does not 
think that what he does is the centre of the 
visible universe." 



40 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

There is a prevailing theory, which seems to 
me largely flavored with cant, that we must 
accept with the utmost humility all foreign 
criticism, because it represents a remoter 
tribunal than our own. But the fact still 
remains, that while some things in art and litera- 
ture are best judged from a distance, other 
things — including the whole department of 
local coloring — can be only judged near home. 
The better the work is done, in this aspect, the 
more essential it is that it should be viewed 
with knowledge. Looking at some marine 
sketches by a teacher of a good deal of note, 
the other day, I was led to point out the fact 
that she had given her schooner a jib, but had 
attached it to no bowsprit, and had anchored a 
whole fleet of dories by the stern instead of 
the bow. When I called the artist's attention 
to these peculiarities, the simple answer was : 
" I know nothing whatever about boats. I 
painted only what I saw, or thought I saw." 
In the same way one can scarcely open a foreign 
criticism on an American book, without seeing 
that, however good may be the abstract canons 
of criticism adopted, the detailed comment is as 



ON TAKING OURSELVES SERIOUSLY 41 

confused as if a landsman were writing about 
seamanship. When, for instance, a vivacious 
Londoner like Mr. Andrew Lang attempts to 
deal with that profound imaginative creation, 
Arthur Dimmesdale, in the " Scarlet Letter," 
he fails to comprehend him from an obvious 
and perhaps natural want of acquaintance with 
the whole environment of the man. To Mr. 
Lang he is simply a commonplace clerical Love- 
lace, a dissenting clergyman caught in a shabby 
intrigue. But if this clever writer had known 
the Puritan clergy as we know them, the high- 
priests of a Jewish theocracy, with the whole 
work of God in a strange land resting on 
their shoulders, he would have comprehended 
the awful tragedy in this tortured soul, and 
would have seen in him the profoundest and 
most minutely studied of all Hawthorne's 
characterizations. The imaginary offender for 
whom that great author carried all winter, as 
Mrs. Hawthorne told me, "a knot in his fore- 
head," is not to be viewed as if his tale were a 
mere chapter out of the " Mdmoires de Casa- 
nova." 

When, at the beginning of this century, 



42 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

Isaiah Thomas founded the American Anti- 
quarian Society, he gave it as one of his avowed 
objects " that the library should contain a 
complete collection of the works of American 
authors." There was nothing extravagant, at 
that time, in the supposition that a single 
library of moderate size might do this ; and 
the very impossibility of such an inclusion, at 
this day, is in part the result of the honest zeal 
with which Isaiah Thomas recognized the " im- 
portance " of our nascent literature. A dis- 
paraging opinion of any of these American 
books, or of all of them, does no more harm 
than the opinion of Pepys, that " Comus " was 
" an insipid, ridiculous play." In many cases 
the opinion will be well deserved ; in few cases 
will it do any permanent harm. Since Emer- 
son, we have ceased to be colonial, and have 
therefore ceased to be over-sensitive. The only 
danger is that, Emerson being dead, there should 
be a slight reaction toward colonial diffidence 
once more ; that we should again pass through 
the apologetic period ; that we should cease for 
a time to take ourselves seriously. 



A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD 43 



A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD 

"TT has lately become the fashion in the United 
States to talk of the cosmopolitan standard 
as the one thing needful ; to say that formerly 
American authors were judged by their own 
local tribunals, but henceforth they must be 
appraised by the world's estimate. The trouble 
is, that for most of those who reason in this 
way, cosmopolitanism does not really mean the 
world's estimate, but only the judgment of 
Europe — a judgment in which America itself 
is to have no voice. Like the trade-winds which 
so terrified the sailors of Columbus, it blows 
only from the eastward. There is no manner 
of objection to cosmopolitanism, if the word be 
taken in earnest. There is something fine in 
the thought of a federal republic of letters, a 
vast literary tribunal of nations, in which each 
nation has a seat; but this is just the kind of 
cosmopolitanism which these critics do not seek. 
They seek merely a far-off judgment, and this 



44 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

is no better than a local tribunal ; in some 
respects it is worse. The remotest standard of 
judgment that I ever encountered was that 
of the late Professor Ko-Kun-Hua, of Harvard 
University. There was something delicious in 
looking into his serene and inscrutable face, and 
in trying to guess at the operations of a highly 
trained mind, to which the laurels of Plato and 
Shakespeare were as absolutely unimportant as 
those of the Sweet Singer of Michigan ; yet the 
tribunal which he afforded could hardly be called 
cosmopolitan. He undoubtedly stood, however, 
for the oldest civilization ; and it seemed trivial 
to turn from his serene Chinese indifference, 
and attend to children of a day like the Revue 
des deux Mondes and the Saturday Review. If 
we are to recognize a remote tribunal, let us 
by all means prefer one that has some maturity 
about it. 

But it is worth while to remember that, as a 
matter of fact, the men who created the Ameri- 
can government gave themselves very little 
concern about cosmopolitanism, but simply went 
about their own work. They took hints from 
older nations, and especially from the mother 



A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD 45 

country, but they acknowledged no jurisdiction 
there. The consensus of the civilized world, 
then and for nearly a century after, viewed the 
American government as a mere experiment, 
and republican institutions as a bit of short- 
lived folly ; yet the existence of the new nation 
gave it a voice henceforth in every tribunal call- 
ing itself cosmopolitan. Henceforth that word 
includes the judgment of the New World on 
the Old, as well as that of the Old World on the 
New ; and when we construe literary cosmo- 
politanism in the same way, we shall be on as 
firm ground in literature as in government. 

So long as we look merely outside of ourselves 
for a standard, we are as weak as if we looked 
merely inside of ourselves ; probably weaker, 
for timidity is weaker than even the arrogance 
of strengfth. There is no danger that the for- 
eign judgment will not duly assert itself ; the 
danger is, that our own self-estimate will be too 
apologetic. What Avith courtesy and good- 
nature, and a lingering of the old colonialism, 
we are not yet beyond the cringing period in 
our literary judgment. The obeisance of all 
good society in London before a successful cir- 



46 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

cus-manager from America was only a shade 
more humiliating than the reverential attention 
visible in the American press when Matthew 
Arnold was kind enough to stand on tiptoe upon 
our lecture-platform and apply his little meas- 
uring-tape to the great shade of Emerson. I 
should like to see in our literature some of the 
honest self-assertion shown by Senator Tracy of 
Litchfield, Connecticut, during Washington's 
administration, in his reply to the British Min- 
ister's praises of Mrs. Oliver Wolcott's beauty. 
" Your countrywoman,'" said the Englishman, 
" would be admired at the Court of St. James." 
— "Sir," said Tracy, "she is admired even on 
Litchfield Hill." 

In that recent book of aphorisms which has 
given a fresh impulse to the fading fame of Di-. 
Channing, he points out that the hope of the 
world lies in the fact that parents can not make 
of their children what they will. It is equally 
true of parent nations. How easily we accept 
the little illusions offered us by our elders in 
the world's literature, almost forgetting that 
two and two make four, in the innocent delight 
with which they inspire us ! In re-reading Scott's 



A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD 47 

" Old Mortality " the other day, I was pleased 
to find myself still carried away by the author's 
own grandiloquence, where he describes the 
approach of Claverhouse and his men to the 
castle of Tillietudlem. " The train was long and 
imposing, for there were about two hundred 
and iifty horse upon the march." Two hundred 
and fifty ! Yet I read it for the moment with 
as little demur at these trivial statistics as if 
our own Sheridan had never ridden out of Win- 
chester at the head of ten thousand cavalry. 
It is the same with all literature : we are asked 
to take Europe at Europe's own valuation, and 
then to take America at Europe's valuation also ; 
and whenever we speak of putting an American 
valuation upon the four quarters of the globe, 
we are told that this will not do ; this is not 
cosmopolitan. 

We are too easily misled, in exhorting Ameri- 
can authors to a proper humility, because we 
forget that the invention of printing has in a 
manner placed all nations on a level. Litera- 
ture is the only art whose choicest works are 
easily transportable. Once secure a public li- 
brary in every town — a condition now in pro- 



48 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

cess of fulfilment in our older American States 
— and every bright boy or girl has a literary 
Louvre and Vatican at command. Given a 
taste for literature, and there are at hand all the 
masters of the art — Plato and Homer, Cicero 
and Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. 
Travel is still needed, but not for books — only 
for other forms of art, for variety of acquaint- 
anceship, and for the habit of dealing with men 
and women of many nationalities. The most 
fastidious American in Europe should not look 
with shame, but with pride and hope, upon those 
throngs of his fellow-countrymen whom he sees 
crowding the art-galleries of Europe, looking 
about them as ignorantly, if you please, as the 
German barbarians when they entered Rome. 
It is not so hard to gain culture ; the thing 
almost impossible to obtain, unless it be born in 
us, is the spirit of initiative, of self-confidence. 
That is the gift with which great nations begin ; 
we now owe our chief knowledge of Roman 
literature and art to the descendants of those 
Northern barbarians. 

And it must be kept in view, finally, that a 
cosmopolitan tribunal is at best but a court of 



A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD 49 

appeal, and is commonly valuable in proportion 
as the courts of preliminary jurisdiction have 
done their duty. The best preparation forgoing 
abroad is to know the worth of what one has 
seen at home. I remember to have been im- 
pressed with a little sense of dismay, on first 
Hearing the shores of Europe, at the thought 
of what London and Paris might show me in 
the way of great human personalities; but I 
said to myself, " To one who has heard Emer- 
son lecture, and Parker preach, and Garrison 
thunder, and Phillips persuade, there is no rea- 
son why Darwin or Victor Hugo should pass 
for more than mortal ; " and accordingly they 
did not. We shall not prepare ourselves for a 
cosmopolitan standard by ignoring our own 
great names or undervaluing the literary tradition 
that has produced them. When Stuart Newton, 
the artist, was asked, on first arriving in London 
from America, whether he did not enjoy the 
change, he answered honestly, ^' I here see such 
society occasionally, as I saw at home all the 
time." At this day the self-respecting Amer- 
ican sometimes hears admissions in Europe 
which make him feel that we are already ere- 



50 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

ating a standard, not waiting to be judged by 
one. The most variously accomplished literary 
critic in England, the late Mark Pattison, said 
to me of certain American books then lately 
published, " Is such careful writing appreciated 
in the United States ? It would not be in Eng- 
land." On the shores of a new continent, then, 
there was already a standard which was in one 
respect better than the cosmopolitan. 



A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 51 

VI 

A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 

^T^HERE is an American novel, now pretty 
effectually forgotten, which yet had the 
rare honor of contributing one permanent phrase 
to English literature. I remember well the sur- 
prise produced, in my boyhood, by the appear- 
ance of "Stanley; or, The Recollections of a 
Man of the World." It was so crammed with 
miscellaneous literary allusion and criticism, 
after the fashion of those days, that it was at- 
tributed by some critics to Edward Everett, then 
the standing representative of omniscience in 
our Eastern States. This literary material was 
strung loosely upon a plot wild and improbable 
enough for Brockden Brown, and yet vivid 
enough to retain a certain charm, for me at 
least, even until this day. It was this plot, 
perhaps, which led the late James T. Fields to 
maintain that Maturin was the author of the 
novel in question ; but it is now known to have 
been the production of Horace Binney Wallace 



52 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

of Philadelphia, then a youth of twenty-one. 
In this book occurs the sentence : " Byron's 
European fame is the best earnest of his immor- 
tality, for a foreign nation is a kind of contem- 
poraneous posterity." ^ 

Few widely quoted phrases have had, I fancy, 
less foundation. It is convenient to imasfine 
that an ocean or a mountain barrier, or even a 
line of custom houses, may furnish a sieve that 
shall sift all true reputations from the chaff ; 
but in fact, I suspect, Avhatever whims may vary 
or unsettle immediate reputations on the sj^ot, 
these disturbing influences are only redistrib- 
uted, not abolished, by distance. Whether we 
look to popular preference or to the judgment 
of high authorities, the result is equally baf- 
fling. Napoleon Bonaparte preferred Ossian, it 
is said, to Shakespeare ; and Voltaire placed the 
latter among the minor poets, viewing him at 
best as we now view Marlowe, as the author of 
an occasional mighty line. It was after Mrs. 
Elizabeth Montagu had been asked to hear Vol- 
taire demolish Shakespeare at an evening party 
in Paris that she made her celebrated answer, 

1 ii. 89. 



A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 53 

when the host expressed the hope that she had 
not been pained by the criticism : " Why should 
I be pained ? I have not the honor to be among 
the intimate friends of M. de Voltaire." Even 
at this day the French journalists are quite be- 
wildered by the Pall 3Iall Gazette s lists of 
English immortals ; and ask who Tennyson is, 
and what plays Ruskin has written. Those 
who happened, like myself, to be in Paris dur- 
ing the Exposition of 1878 remember well the 
astonishment produced in the French mind by 
the discovery that any pictures Avere painted in 
England ; and the French Millet was at that 
time almost as little known in London as was 
his almost namesake, the English Millais, in 
Paris. If a foreign nation represented poster- 
ity, neither of these eminent artists appeared 
then to have a chance of lasting fame. 

When we see the intellectual separation thus 
maintained between England and France, with 
only the width of the Channel between them, 
we can understand the separation achieved by 
the Atlantic, even where there is no essential 
difference of language. M. Taine tries to con- 
vince Frenchmen that the forty English " im- 



54 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

mortals " selected by the readers of the Pall 
Mall Grazette are equal, taken together, to the 
French Academicians. " You do not know 
them, you say? " he goes on. " That is not a 
sufficient reason. The English, and all who 
speak English, know them well, but, on the 
other hand, know little of our men of letters." 
After this a French paper, reprinting a similar 
English list, added comments on the names, 
like this : " Robert Browning, the Scotch poet." 
There is probably no better manual of universal 
knowledge than the great French dictionary of 
Larousse. When people come with miscella- 
neous questions to the Harvard College libra- 
rians, they often say in return, " Have you 
looked in Larousse? " Now, when one looks in 
Larousse to see who Robert Browning was, one 
finds the statement that the genius of Browning 
is more analogous to that of his American con- 
temporaries " Emerton, Wendell Holmes, and 
Bigelow "' than to that of any English poet 
(^celle de n^importe quel poete atiglais.^ This 
transformation of Emerson into Emerton, and 
of Lowell, probably, to Bigelow, is hardly more 
extraordinary than to link together three such 



A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 55 

dissimilar poets, and compare Browning to all 
three of them, or, indeed, to either of the three. 
Yet it gives us the high-water mark of what 
"contemporaneous posterity" has to offer. The 
criticism of another nation can, no doubt, offer 
some advantages of its own — a fresh pair of 
eyes and freedom from cliques ; but a foreigner 
can be no judge of local coloring, whether in 
nature or manners. The mere knowledsre of 
the history of a nation may be essential to a 
knowledge of its art. 

So far as literature goes, the largest element 
of foreign popularity lies naturally in some kin- 
ship of language. Reputation follows the line 
of least resistance. The Germanic races take 
naturally to the literature of their own con- 
geners, and so with the Latin. As these last 
have had precedence in organizing the social 
life of the world, so they still retain it in their 
literary sway. The French tongue, in particu- 
lar, while ceasing to be the vehicle of all 
travelling intercourse, is still the second lan- 
guage of all the world. A Portuguese gentle- 
man said once to a friend of mine that he was 
studying French " in order to have something 



56 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

to read." All the empire of Great Britain, 
circling the globe, affords to her poets or 
novelists but a petty and insular audience com- 
pared with that addressed by George Sand or 
Victor Hugo. A Roman Catholic convert from 
America, going from Paris to Rome, and having 
audience with a former pope, is said to have 
been a little dismayed when his Holiness 
instantly inquired, with eager solicitude, as to 
the rumored illness of Paul de Kock — the 
milder Zola of the last generation. In con- 
temporaneous fame, then, the mere accident of 
nationality and language plays an enormous 
part ; but this accident will clearly have nothing 
to do with the judgment of posterity. 

If any foreign country could stand for a 
contemporaneous posterit}^ one would think it 
might be a younger nation judging an older 
one. Yet how little did the American reputa- 
tions of fifty years ago afford any sure predic- 
tion of permanent fame in respect to English 
writers ! True, we gave early recognition to 
Carlyle and Tennyson, but scarcely greater 
than to authors now faded or fading into ob- 
scurity, — Milnes (Lord Houghton), Sterling, 



A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 57 

Trench, Alford, and Bailey. No English poem, 
it was said, ever sold through so many Ameri- 
can editions as " Festus ; " nor was Tupper's 
" Proverbial Philosophy " far behind it. Trans- 
lators and publishers quarrelled bitterly for the 
privilege of translating Frederika Bremer's 
novels ; but our young people, who already 
stand for posterity, hardly recall her name. I 
asked a Swedish commissioner at our Centen- 
nial Exhibition in 1876, " Is Miss Bremer still 
read in Sweden?" He shook his head; and 
when I asked, "Who has replaced her?" he 
said, " Bret Harte and Mark Twain." It seemed 
the irony of fame ; and there is no guaranty 
that this reversed national compliment will, any 
more than our recognition of her, predict the 
judgment of the future. 

If this uncertainty exists when the New 
World judges the Old, of which it knows some- 
thing, the insecurity must be greater when the 
Old World judges the New, of which it knows 
next to nothing. If the multiplicity of trans- 
lations be any test, Mrs. Stowe's contemporary 
fame, the world over, has been unequalled in 
literature; but will any one now say that it 



68 THE NEW WOKLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

surely predicts the judgment of posterity? 
Consider the companion instances. Next to 
" Uncle Tom's Cabin " ranked for a season, 
doubtless, in European favor, that exceedingly 
commonplace novel " The Lamplighter," whose 
very name is now almost forgotten at home. It 
is impossible to say what law enters into such 
successes as this last ; but one of the most 
obvious demands made by all foreign contem- 
porary judgment is, that an American book 
should supply to a jaded public the element of 
the unexpected. Europe demands from Amer- 
ica not so much a new thought and purpose, as 
some new dramatis personam ; that an author 
should exhibit a wholly untried type, — an 
Indian, as Cooper; a negro, as Mrs. Stowe ; a 
mountaineer, as Miss Murfree ; a California 
gambler, as Bret Harte ; a rough or roustabout, 
as Whitman. 

There are commonly two ways to eminent 
social success for an American in foreign 
society, — to be more European than Europeans 
themselves, or else to surpass all other Ameri- 
cans in some amusing peculiarity which for- 
eigners suppose to be American. It is much 



A cojnTemi'okaneous posterity 59 

the same in literature. Lady Morgan, describ- 
ing the high society of Dublin in her daj'^, 
speaks of one man as a great favorite who 
always entered every drawing-room by turning 
a somersault. This is one way of success for 
an American book ; but the other way, which 
is at least more dignified, is rarely successful 
except when combined with personal residence 
and private acquaintance. Down to the year 
1880 Lowell was known in England, almost 
exclusively, as the author of the " Biglow 
Papers," and was habitually classed with Arte- 
mus Ward and Josh Billings, except that his 
audience was smaller. The unusual experience 
of a diplomatic appointment first unveiled to 
the English mind the all-accomplished Lowell 
whom we mourn. Li other cases, as with Pres- 
cott and Motley, there was the mingled attrac- 
tion of European manners and a European 
subject. But a simple and home-loving Amer- 
ican, who writes upon the themes furnished by 
his own nation, without pyrotechnics or fantas- 
tic spelling, is apt to seem to the English mind 
quite uninteresting. There is nothing which 
ordinarily interests Europeans less than an 



60 THE NE^y WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

Americanism unaccompanied by a war-whoop. 
The Saturday Review^ wishing to emphasize its 
contempt for Henry Ward Beecher, finally de- 
clares that one would turn from him with relief 
even to the poems of Whittier. 

There could hardly have been a more ex- 
haustive proof of this local limitation or chau- 
vmis7ne than I myself noticed at a London 
dinner-party some years ago. Our liost was an 
Oxford professor, and the company was an emi- 
nent one. Being hard pressed about American 
literature, I had said incidentally that a great 
deal of intellectual activity in America was 
occupied, and rightly, by the elucidation of our 
own history, — a thing, I added, which inspired 
almost no interest in Eng-land. This fact beinir 
disputed, I said, " Let us take a test case. We 
have in America an historian superior to 
Motley in labors, in originality of treatment, 
and in style. If he had, like Motley, first gone 
abroad for a subject, and then for a residence, 
his European fame would have equalled Mot- 
ley's. As it is, probably not a person present 
except our host will recognize his name." 
When I mentioned Francis Parkman, the predic- 



A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 61 

tion was fulfilled. All, save the host — a man 
better acquainted with the United States, per- 
haps, than any living Englishman— confessed 
utter ignoi'ance : an ignorance shared, it seems, 
by the only English historian of American liter- 
ature. Professor Nicliol, who actually does not 
allude to Parkman. It seems to me that we 
had better, in view of such facts, dismiss the 
tlieory that a foreign nation is a kind of con- 
temporaneous posterity. 



62 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

VII 

ON LITERARY TONICS 

OOME minor English critic wrote lately of 
Dr. Holmes's " Life of Emerson : " " The 
Boston of his day does not seem to have been a 
very strong place ; we lack performance." This 
is doubtless to be attributed rather to ignorance 
than to that want of seriousness which Mr. 
Stedman so justly points out among the younger 
Englishmen. The Boston of which he speaks 
was the Boston of Garrison and Phillips, of 
Whittier and Theodore Parker ; it was the 
headquarters of those old-time abolitionists of 
whom the English Earl of Carlisle wrote that 
they were " fighting a battle without a parallel 
in the history of ancient or modern heroism." 
It was also the place which nurtured those young 
Harvard students who are chronicled in the 
"■ Harvard Memorial Biographies " — those who 
fell in the war of the Rebellion ; those of whom 
Lord Houghton once wrote tersely to me: 
" They are men whom Europe has learned to 



ON LITERARY TONICS 63 

honor and would do well to imitate." The 
service of all these men, and its results, give a 
measure of the tonic afforded in the Boston of 
that da}'. Nay, Emerson himself was directly 
responsible for much of their strength. " To 
him more than to all other causes together," 
says Lowell, " did the young martyrs of our 
Civil War owe the sustaining strength of moral 
heroism that is so touching in every record of 
their lives." And when the force thus de- 
veloped in Boston and elsewhere came to do its 
perfect work, that work turned out to be the 
fighting of a gigantic war and the freeing of 
four millions of slaves ; and this in the teeth of 
every sympathy and desire of all that appeared 
influential in England. This is what is meant, 
in American history at least, by " performance." 
Indeed, as the War of 1812 has been called, 
following a suggestion of Franklin's, " the sec- 
ond War for Independence," so the Civil War 
might be called in the same sense the third war 
of the same kind ; and the evolution of the 
American as a type wholly new and distinct 
from the Englishman, dates largely from that 
event. We are sometimes misled by a few 



64 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

imitations in respect to visiting cards and ser- 
vants' liveries, to be solicitous about a revival 
of Anglomania, forgetting that the very word 
Anglomania implies separation and weaning. I 
can recall when there was no more room for 
Anglomania in New York than in Piccadilly, 
for the simple reason that all was still English ; 
when the one cultivated newsi:)aper in the coun- 
try was the Ncav York Albion, conducted for 
British residents ; when the scene of every child's 
story was laid abroad and not at home ; when 
Irving was read in America because he wrote 
of England, and Cooper's novels Avere regarded 
as a sort of daring eccentricity of the frontier. 
Fifty years ago Anglomania could scarcely be 
said to exist in this country ; for the nation was 
still, for all purposes of art and literature, a mere 
province of England. Now all is changed ; the 
literary tone of the United States is more serious, 
more original, and, in its regard for external 
forms, more cultivated than that now prevailing 
on the other side. Untravelled Americans still 
feel a sense of awe before the English press, 
which vanishes when they visit London and talk 
with the young fellows who write for its jour- 



ON LITERARY TONICS 65 

nals ; and when these youths visit us, what light- 
weights they are apt to seem ! 

Emerson said of our former literary allegiance 
to England that it was the tax we paid for the 
priceless gift of Englisli literature ; but this tax 
should surely not be now a heavy one : a few 
ballades and villanelles seem the chief recent 
importations. The current American criticism 
on the latest English literature is that it is 
brutal or trivial. The London correspondent of 
the Critic quoted some Englishmen the other 
day as saying that the principal results of our 
Civil War had been " the development of Henry 
James, and the adoption of ]Mr. Robert Steven- 
son.'" Mr. Stevenson, if adopted, can hardly 
be brought into the discussion. Mr. James has 
no doubt placed himself as far as possible 
beyond reach of the Civil War by keeping the 
Atlantic Ocean between him and the scene 
wdiere it occurred; but when I recall that I 
myself saw his youngest brother, still almost a 
boy, lying near to death, as it then seemed, in 
a hospital at Beaufort, S. C, after the charge on 
Fort Wagner, I can easily imagine that the 
Civil War may really have done something 



66 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

for Mr. James's development, after all. Mr. 
Howells has scarcely yet given up taking the 
heroes of his books from among those who had 
gone through a similar ordeal, and it will be 
many years before the force of that great im- 
pulse is spent. For one thing, the results of the 
war have liberated the Southern literary genius, 
and that part of the nation, so strangely unpro- 
lific till within twenty-hve years, is now arrest- 
ing its full share of attention, and perhaps even 
more than its share. 

It is difficult to say just how far the influence 
of a literar}^ tonic extends, and Goethe might 
doubtless be cited as an instance where art 
was its own sufficient stimulus. In the cases of 
a writer like Poe, we trace no tonic element. 
The great anti-slavery agitation and the general 
reformatory mood' of half a century ago un- 
doubtedly gave us Channing, Emerson, Whit- 
tier, Longfellow, and Lowell ; not that they 
would not have been conspicuous in any case, 
but that the moral attribute in their natures 
might have been far less marked. The great 
temporary fame of Mrs. Stowe was identified 
with the same influence. Hawthorne and 



ON LITERARY TONICS 67 

Holmes were utterly nntoiiched by the anti- 
slavery agitation, yet both yielded to the excite- 
ment of the war, and felt in some degree its 
fflow. It elicited from Aldrich his noble Fred- 
ericksburg sonnet. Stedman, Stoddard, and 
Bayard Taylor wrote war songs, as did Julia 
Ward Howe conspicuously. Whitman's poem 
on the deatli of Lincoln is, in my judgment, one 
of the few among his compositions which will 
live. Wallace, who must be regarded as on 
the whole our most popular novelist — whatever 
may be tliought of the quality of his work — 
won his first distinction in the Civil War. Cable, 
Lanier, Thompson, and otlier strong writers 
were also engaged in it, on the Confederate side. 
It is absolutely impossible to disentangle from 
the work of any but the very youngest of our 
living American authors that fibre of iron which 
came from our great Civil War and the stormy 
agitation that led up to it. 

What is to succeed that great tonic ? — for 
we can hardly suppose that the human race is 
to be kept forever at war for the sake of sup- 
plying a series of heroic crises. It is evident 
that no particular source of moral stimulus is 



68 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

essential ; the Woman Suffrage movement has 
made a dozen and more women into orators and 
authors ; and Helen Jackson was as thoroughly 
thrilled and insjDired by the wrongs of tlie Ameri- 
can Indians, as was Mrs. Stowe by tliose of the 
Negroes. The American writers who signed 
the petition for tlie pardon of the Chicago 
Anarchists, had at least the wholesome experi- 
ence of standing firmly, whether they were right 
or wrong, against the current opinion of those 
around them. The contributions toward the 
discussion of social questions which have of late 
flowed so freely from clergymen and other non- 
experts, must undoubtedly do good to those 
from whom they proceed, if to no others. The 
essential thing is that the literary man should 
be interested in something which he feels to be 
of incomparably more importance to the uni- 
verse than the development of his own pretty 
talent. We see the same thing across the ocean, 
when Swinburne writes his " Song in Time of 
Order," and Morris marches in a Socialist pro- 
cession. Here lies the power of the Russian 
writers, of Victor Hugo. Probably no man who 
ever lived had an egotism more colossal than 



ON LITERARY TONICS 69 

that of Hugo, yet he was Large enough to sub- 
ordinate even that egotism to the aims that 
absorbed him — to abhorrence of Napoleon the 
Little — to enthusiasm for the golden age of 
man. I like to think of him as I saw him at the 
Voltaire Centenaiy in 18TG, pleading for Uni- 
versal Peace amid the alternate hush and roar 
of thousands of excitable Parisians — his lion- 
like head erect, his strong hand uplifted, his 
voice still powerful at nearly eighty years. So 
vast was the crowd, so deserted the neighbor- 
ing streets, that it all recalled the words put by 
Landor into the lips of Demosthenes : " I have 
seen the day when the most august of cities 
had but one voice within her walls ; and when 
the' stranger on entering them stopped at the 
silence of the gateway, and said, ' Demosthenes 
is speaking in the assembly of the people.' " 



70 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

VIII 

THE FEAR OF THE DEAD LEVEL 

"TT is noticeable that foreign observers, who 
were always a little anxious about the pos- 
sible monotony of our society, have grown a little 
more so since they have ventured west of the 
Alleghanies and crossed the long plain to be 
traversed before reaching the Rocky Mountains. 
In the days when an American trip culminated 
at Niagara, and even Trenton Falls was con- 
sidered a si^ht so remarkable that Charles 
Sumner wrote from England to caution a 
traveller by no means to quit the country 
without seeing it, there was no complaint that 
our scenery was monotonous. The continent 
was supposed to have done all, in that line, 
which could fairly be asked of it. Since then, 
the criticism has grown with the railway jour- 
ney, and people fear that the liorizontal line of 
the prairies must more than counterbalance the 
vertical line of Niagara, in moulding the Ameri- 
can mind. Then these very travellers are justly 



THE FEAR OF THE DEAD LEVEL 71 

anxious about the sameness of our cities ; the 
streets numbered one way, the avenues the 
other. " Can the young heart," they ask, 
" attach definite associations or tender emotions 
with an Arabic figure? Is there romance in 
numeration?" Probably they carry the criticism 
too far. As Nature, according to Emerson, 
loves the number five, so does the well-bred 
New Yorker. Surely " Fifth Avenue " has as 
definite and distinctive a meaning for him as if 
there were no other number in the universe ; 
and I am sure that in every city there is some 
youth who cannot look up at the street-sign 
denoting some Twenty-third Street or Tliirty- 
fifth Street without a slight sjDasm of the heart. 
Such associations last a great while, even if the 
street be disagreeable ; the philosopher Des- 
cartes was enamored in his youth with a young 
lady who squinted a little, and it is said that he 
never through life could behold without the 
tenderest emotion a woman having a cast in her 
eye. If Descartes was permanently sentimental 
about orbs that were crooked, cannot others be 
so about streets that are straight ? 

Still, in the long run, monotony is not satis- 



72 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

fying ; and the kind traveller hastens to con- 
ciliate local pride by granting some individuality 
to a few cities, such as New York, Washington, 
Chicago, New Orleans, Boston. It is very 
possible that a closer student of this particular 
point might find less monotony, even among 
towns, than he does. In Mr. Warner's late 
studies of American cities, for instance, we are 
struck, not with the sameness, but with the 
variety. Much depends upon the trained eye. 
A long railway trip across a level plain is 
monotonous to one who is looking for bold 
scenery ; but it may not be monotonous to the 
agriculturist who is studying the crops, or to 
the botanist who is looking out for trees and 
wild flowers, or to the student of human nature 
who is watching for new types of character. So 
an exhibition of machinery is monotonous to the 
ignorant, but full of knowledge to the expert ; 
and there was a capital illustration in Punch at 
the time of the first International Exposition in 
London, showing the difference between a 
group of bored fashionables, passing languidly 
through the hall devoted to new inventions, and 
a i)arty of intelligent mechanics eagerly exam- 



THE FEAR OF THE DEAD LEVEL 73 

ining a machine. So of human beings : to a 
raw officer of colored troops, for instance, in the 
Civil War, his men looked hopelessly alike as 
they stood uniformed in line ; but he soon found 
that every face had its individuality. I have 
even heard teachers say the same of a new class, 
black or white, on its entering school. Living 
in a college town, I find the young men looking 
so much the same, so long as I do not know 
them, as to suggest the wish expressed by 
Humpty Dumpty to Alice, that some human 
beings could be constructed with their features 
differently combined — the noses, for instance, 
being sometimes put above the eyebrows — in 
order to distinguish them more conspicuously. 
Yet each one becomes on acquaintance a per- 
fectly defined personality ; and it is complained 
by their professors that there is sometimes 
rather an excess of individuality, when it comes 
to discipline. 

It turns out, then, that individuality depends 
largely on the observer. Thoreau points out 
that no two oak-leaves are precisely alike ; and 
Scudder says the same of the markings on 
butterflies' wings. Alexander von Humboldt 



74 THE NEW WOKLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

remarked that this trait develops with civili- 
zation ; a hundred wild dogs are more alike 
than their domesticated kindred, and so of a 
hundred wild men. If the stej) we have taken 
in America, away from courts and hereditary 
institutions, be a step in civilization, then it is 
certainly to lead to more individuality, not less. 
Even in England, where is marked individuality 
to be found ? Surely, among the men who have 
made the name of England great ; her artists, 
authors, inventors, scientific teachers. Yet Mr. 
Besant has lately pointed out, in a very impres- 
sive passage, that scarcely one of these men 
ever went near the court of England. The 
marked individuality of that nation, therefore, 
is distinctly outside of the court circle ; and, if 
so, individuality would gain and not lose by 
dropping those circles altogether. The diffi- 
culty is that the court circle substitutes for 
this quality a mere variation of costume — a 
robe, a decoration. But in reality these things 
subdue individualit}^ instead of developing it ; 
as every recruiting officer found, during our 
Civil War, that recruits became more docile the 
moment they put on the uniform ; and a lady 



THE FEAR OF THE DEAD LEVEL 75 

at Newport once vindicated to me the desirable- 
ness of liveries on the ground that they were 
"very repressive." In persons of higher grade 
in England there is developed the official — the 
Lord Chamberlain, the Lord of the Hounds ; or 
the typical hereditary lord, in perhaps two dif- 
ferent types, "the wicked lord," and "the good 
lord ; " but there is no added development of 
the individual. 

It all comes to this, then, that for the develop- 
ment of individuality you must have a free 
career; and the guarantee of freedom is the 
first step toward what you seek. Nowhere will 
you find a more racy personality than among 
New England farmers, whose fathers lived 
before them on the same soil, or perhaps six 
generations of ancestors, and who, among all 
restrictions of hard soil and severe competition, 
have yet kept their separate characteristics. I 
have spent summer after summer in the country, 
and have never yet encountered two farmers 
alike — two who would not, even if drawn by 
an unsympathetic though acute observer like 
Howells, stand out on the canvas with as 
marked an individuality as Silas Lapham. It 



76 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

is SO with our native-born population generally. 
In the best volume of New England stories ever 
written — it is perhaps needless to say that I 
refer to " Five Hundred Dollars a Year and 
Other Stories," by Mr. H. W. Chaplin — there 
is an inimitable scene in a jury-room where the 
hero, " Eli," holds out during many hours for the 
innocence of a wronged man. The jurymen are 
commonplace personages enough — a sea cap- 
tain, a butcher, a pedler, and so on — and. yet 
their talk through page after page Ijrings out 
in each a type of character so vivid and distinct 
that you feel sure that you would know each 
interlocutor afterward, if you met him in the 
street. He who approaches human nature in 
such a spirit need have no fear of the dead 
level. 



DO WE NEED A LITERARY CENTRE? 77 

IX 

DO WE NEED A LITERARY CENTRE? 

"TN the latter days of the last French Empire 
some stir was made by a book claiming that 
Paris was already the capital of the Avorld — 
Paj'is capitale du monde. Mr. Lowell has lately 
made claims rather more moderate for London, 
suggesting that a time may come when the 
English-speaking race will practically control 
the planet, having London for its centre, with 
all roads leading to it, as they once led to 
Rome. But it is plain that in making this 
estimate Mr. Lowell overlooked some very 
essential factors — for instance, himself. If 
ancient Rome had borrowed for its most im- 
portant literary addresses an orator from Paph- 
lagonia, who was not even a Roman citizen, it 
would plainly have ceased to be the Rome of 
our reverence ; and yet this is what has re- 
peatedly been done in London by the selection 
of Mr. Lowell. Or if the province of Britain 
had furnished a periodical publication— an Acta 



78 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

Eruditorum, let us say — whicli had been regu- 
larly reprinted in Rome Avith a wider circula- 
tion than any metropolitan issue, then Rome 
would again have ceased to be Rome ; and yet 
this is what is done in London every month b}^ 
the American illustrated magazines. It is 
clear, then, that London is not the exclusive 
intellectual centre of the English-speaking 
world, nor is there the slightest evidence that 
it is becoming more and more such a centre. 
On the contrary, one hears in England a pro- 
longed groan over an imagined influence the 
other way. " I have long felt," wrote Sir 
Frederick Elliot to Sir Henry Taylor from 
London (December 20, 1877), " that the most 
certain of political tendencies in England is 
what, for want of a better name, I will call the 
Yankeeizing tendency." But apart from these 
suggestions as to London, Mr. Lowell has 
urged and urged strongly the need of a na- 
tional capital. He has expressed the wish for 
" a focus of intellectual, moral, and material 
activity," " a common head, as well as a com- 
mon body." In this he errs only, as it seems to 
me, in applying too readily to our vaster con- 



DO WE NEED A LITERARY CENTRE? 79 

ditions the standards and traditions of much 
smaller countries. If it be true, as was said the 
other day by our eloquent English-born clergy- 
man in New York, Dr. Rainsford, that America 
is a branch which is rapidly becoming the main 
stem, then the fact may as well be recognized. 
As in our political system, so in literature, we 
may need a new plan of structure for that which 
is to embrace a continent — a system of co-ordi- 
nate states instead of a centralized empire. Our 
literature, like our laws, will probably proceed 
not from one focus, but from many. To one 
looking across from London or Paris this would 
seem impossible, for while living in a great city 
you come to feel as if that spot were all the 
world, and all else must be abandoned, as Cher- 
buliez's heroine says, to the indiscreet curiosity 
of geographers. But when you again look at 
that city from across the ocean, you perceive 
how easily it may cramp and confine those who 
live in it, and you are grateful for elbow-room 
and fresh air. Nothing smaller than a conti- 
nent can really be large enough to give space 
for the literature of the future. 

It is to be considered that in this age great 



80 THE NEW AVORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

cities do not exhibit, beyond a certain point, 
the breadth of atmosphere that one expects 
from a world's capitaL On the contrary, we 
find in Paris, in Berlin, in London, a certain 
curious narrowness, an immense exaggeration 
of its own petty and local interests. We meet 
there individual men of extraordinary knowl- 
edge in this or that direction, but the inter- 
change of thought and feeling seems to lie 
within a ring-fence. A good test of this is in 
the recent books of " reminiscences " or " re- 
membrances " by accomplished men who have 
lived for years in the most brilliant circles of 
London. Each day is depicted as a string of 
pearls, but with only the names of the pearls 
mentioned ; the actual jewels are not forthcom- 
ing. A man breakfasts with one circle of wits 
and sages, lunches with another, dines with a 
third ; and all this intellectual affluence yields 
him for his diary perhaps a single anecdote or 
repartee no better than are to be found by 
dozens in the corners of American country 
newspapers. It recalls what a clever American 
artist once told me, that he had dined tri- 
umphantl}' through three English counties, and 



DO WE NEED A LITERARY CENTRE? 81 

brought away a great social reputation, on the 
strength of the stories in one old " Farmer's 
Almanac '' which he had put in his trunk to 
protect some books on leaving home. The very 
excess or congestion of intellect in a great city 
seems to defeat itself ; there is no time or 
strength left for anything beyond the most 
superficial touch-and-go intercourse; it is persi- 
flage carried to the greatest perfection, but you 
get little more. 

A great metropolis is moreover disappointing, 
because, although it may furnish great men, its 
literary daily bread is inevitably supplied by 
small men, who revolve round the larger ones, 
and who are even less interesting to the visitor 
than tlie same class at home. There is some- 
thing amusing in the indifference of every special 
neighborhood to all literary gossip except its 
own. For instance, one might well have sup- 
posed that the admiration of Englishmen for 
Longfellow might inspire an intelligent desire 
to know something of his daily interests, of his 
friendships and pursuits ; yet when liis Memoirs 
appeared, all English critics pronounced these 
things exceedingly uninteresting ; while much 



82 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

smaller gossip about much smaller people, in 
the Hayward Memoirs, was found by these same 
critics to be an important addition to the history 
of the times. It is an absolute necessity for 
every nation, as for every age, to insist on set- 
ting its own standard, even to the resolute re- 
adjustment of well-established reputations. So 
long as it does not, it will find itself overawed 
and depressed, not as much by the greatness of 
some metropolis, as by its littleness. 

It is the calamity of a large city that its 
smallest men appear to themselves important 
simply because they dwell there ; just as Trav- 
ers, the New York wit, explained his stutter- 
ing more in that city than in Baltimore, on 
the ground that it was a larger place. The 
London literary journals seem to an American 
visitor to be largely filled with Epistolce ohscuro- 
rum virorum ; and when I attended, some years 
since, the first meetings of the Association 
Litteraire Internationale in Paris, it was impos- 
sible not to be impressed by the multitude of 
minor literary personages, among whom a writer 
so mediocre as Edmond About towered as a 
giant. But no doubts of their own supreme 



DO WE NEED A LITERARY CENTRE? 83 

importance to the universe appeared to beset 
these young gentlemen : — 

" How many thousand never heard the name 
Of Sidney or of Spenser, or their books ? 
And yet brave fellows, and presume of fame. 

And think to bear down all the world with looks." 

One was irresistibly reminded, in their society, 
of these lines of old Daniel; or of the comfort- 
able self-classification of another Frenchman, 
M. Vestris, the dancer, who always maintained 
that there were but three really great men in 
Europe — Voltaire, Frederick II., and himself. 
We talk about small places as being Little Ped- 
lingtons, but it sometimes seems as if the Great 
Pedlingtons were the smallest, after all, because 
there is nobody to teach them humility. Little 
Pedlington at least shows itself apologetic and 
even uneasy ; that is what saves it to reason and 
common-sense. But fancy a Parisian apologiz- 
ing for Paris ! 

The great fear of those who demand an intel- 
lectual metropolis is provincialism; but we 
must remember that the word is used in two 
wholly different senses, which have nothing in 
common. What an American understands by 



84 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

provincialism is best to be seen in the little 
French town, some imaginary Tarascon or Car- 
cassonne, where the notary and the physician 
and the rentiers sit and play dominoes and 
feebly disport themselves in a beniiml^ed world 
of petty gossip. But what the Parisian or the 
Londoner would assume to be provincial among 
us is an American town, perhaps of the same size, 
but which has already its schools aud its public 
library well established, and is now aiming at 
a gallery of art and a conservatory of music. 
To confound these O2:)posite extremes of devel- 
opment under one name is like confounding 
childhood and second childhood; the one repre- 
senting all promise, the other all desi^air. Mr. 
Henry James, who proves his innate kindness 
of heart by the constancy with which he is al- 
ways pitying somebody, turns the full fervor of 
his condolence on Hawthorne for dwelling amid 
the narrowing influences of a Concord atmos- 
phere. But if those influences gave us "The 
Scarlet Letter "' and Emerson's "Essays," does 
it not seem almost a pity that we cannot extend 
that same local atmosphere, as President Lin- 
coln proposed to do with Grant's whiskey, to 
some of our other oenerals ? 



DO WE NEED A LITERARY CENTRE? 85 

The dweller in a metropolis has the advan- 
tage, if snch it be, of writing immediately for 
a few thousand people, all whose prejudices he 
knows and perhaps shares. He writes to a 
picked audience ; but he who dwells in a coun- 
try without a metropolis has the immeasurably 
greater advantage of writing for an audience 
Avhich is, so to speak, unpicked, and which, 
therefore, includes the picked one, as an apple 
includes its core. One does not need to be a 
very great author in America to find that his 
voice is heard across a continent — ^a thing more 
stimulating and more impressive to the imagi- 
nation than the morning drum-beat of Great 
Britain. The whole vast nation, but a short 
time since, was simultaneously following the 
" Rise of Silas Lapham," or "" The Casting Away 
of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine." In a few 
years the humblest of the next generation of 
writers will be appealing to a possible constit- 
uency of a hundred millions. He who writes 
for a metropolis may unconsciously share its 
pettiness ; he who writes for a hundred millions 
must feel some expansion in his thoughts, even 
though his and theirs be still crude. Keats 



86 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

asked his friend to throw a copy of " Endymion " 
into the heart of the African desert; is it not 
better to cast your book into a vaster region 
that is alive with men ? 

Cliques lose their seeming importance where 
one has the human heart at his door. That 
calamity which Fontenelle mourned, the loss of 
so many good things by their being spoken only 
into the ear of some fool, can never happen to 
what is written for a whole continent. There 
will be a good auditor somewhere, and the 
farther off, the more encouraging. When your 
sister or your neighbor praises your work, they 
may be suspected of partiality; when the news- 
papers commend, the critic may be very friendly 
or very juvenile ; but when the post brings you 
a complimentary letter from a new-born village 
in Colorado, you become conscious of an audi- 
ence. Now, suppose the intellectual aspirations 
of that frontier village to be so built up by 
schools, libraries, and galleries that it shall be 
a centre of thought and civilization for the 
Avhole of Colorado, — a State which is in itself 
about the size of Great Britain or Italy, and 
half the size of Germany or France, — and we 



DO WE NEED A LITERARY CENTRE? 87 

shall have a glimpse at a state of things worth 
more than a national metropolis. The collec- 
tive judgment of a series of smaller tribunals 
like this will ultimately be worth more to an 
author, or to a literature, than that of London 
or Paris. History gives us, in the Greek 
states, the Italian Republics, the German uni- 
versity towns, some examples of such a concur- 
rent intellectual jurisdiction ; but they missed 
the element of size, the element of democratic 
freedom, the element of an indefinite future. 
All these are ours. 



88 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

X 

THE EQUATION OF FAME 

n|"^HE aim of all ciiticism is really to solve 
the equation of fame and to find what lit- 
erary work is of real value. For convenience, 
the critic assumes the attitude of infallibilit3^ 
He really knows better in his own case, being 
commonly an author also. The curious thing 
is that, by a sort of comity of the profession, 
the critic who is an author assumes that other 
critics are infallible also, or at least a body 
worthy of vast deference. He is as sensitive to 
the praise or blame of his contemporaries as he 
would have them toward himself. He bows his 
head before the "London Press " or the "New 
York Press " as meekly as if he did not know 
full well that these august bodies are made up 
of just such weak and unstable mortals as he 
knows himself to be. At the Saville Club in 
London an American is introduced to some 
beardless youth, and presently, when some 
slashing criticism is mentioned, in the Academe/ 



THE EQUATION OF FAME 89 

or the Saturday Review, the fact incidentally 
comes out that his companion happened to write 
that very article. "Never again," the visitor 
thinks, '' shall I be any more awed by what I 
read in those periodicals than if it had appeared 
in my village newspaper at home." But he 
goes his way, and in a month is looking Avith 
as much deference as ever for the '' verdict of 
the London Press." It seems a tribute to the 
greatness of our common nature that the most 
ordinary individuals have weight with us as 
soon as there are enough of them to get to- 
gether in a jury-box, or even in a newspaper 
office, and pronounce a decision. As Chan- 
cellor Oxenstiern sent the young man on his 
travels to see with how little wisdom the world 
was governed, so it is worth while for every 
young writer to visit New York or London, that 
he may see with how little serious consideration 
his work will be criticised. The only advan- 
tage conferred by added years in authorship is 
that one learns this lesson a little better, though 
the oldest author never learns it very well. 

But apart from all drawbacks in the way of 
haste and shallowness, there is a profounder 



90 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

difficulty which besets the most careful critical 
work. It inevitably takes the color of the 
time; its study of the stars is astrology, not 
astronomy, to adopt Thoreau's distinction. 
Heine points out, in his essay on German 
Romanticism, that we greatly err in supposing 
that Goethe's early fame bore much comparison 
with his deserts. He was, indeed, praised for 
"Werther" and "Gotz von Berlichingen," but 
the romances of August La Fontaine were in 
equal demand, and the latter, being a volu- 
minous writer, was much more in men's mouths. 
The poets of the period were Wieland and 
Ramler; and Kotzebue and Iffland ruled the 
stage. Even forty years ago, I remember well, 
it was considered an open subject of discussion 
whether Goethe or Schiller was the greater 
name; and Professor Felton of Harvard Uni- 
versity took the pains to translate a long his- 
tory of German literature by Menzel, the one 
object of which was to show that Goethe was 
quite a secondary figure, and not destined to 
any lasting reputation. It was one of the 
objections to Margaret Fuller, in the cultivated 
Cambridge circle of that day, that she spoke 



THE EQUATION OF FAME 91 

disrespectfully of Menzel in the Dial^ and called 
him a Philistine — the first introduction into 
English, so far as I know, of that word since 
familiarized by Arnold and others. 

We fancy France to be a place where, if 
governments are changeable, literary fame, 
fortified by academies, rests on sure ground. 
But Theophile Gautier, in the preface to his 
"Les Grotesques," says just the contrary. He 
declares that in Paris all praise or blame is 
overstated, because, in order to save the trouble 
of a serious opinion, they take up one writer 
temporarily in order to get rid of the rest. 
"There are," he goes on, "strange fluctuations 
in reputations, and aureoles change heads. 
After death, illuminated foreheads are extin- 
guished and obscure brows grow bright. Pos- 
terity means night for some, dawn to others." 
Who would to-day believe, he asks, that the 
obscure writer Chapelain passed for long years 
as the greatest poet, not alone of France, but 
the whole world (le plus grand poete^ non-seule- 
ment de France^ mais du monde eritier), and 
that nobody less potent than the Duchesse de 
Longueville would have dared to go to sleep 



92 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

over his poem of '"''La Pacelle^f Yet this was 
in the time of Corneille, Racine, Moliere, and 
La Fontaine. 

Heine points out that it is not enough for 
a poet to utter his own sympathies, he must also 
reach those of his audience. The audience, he 
thinks, is often like some hungry Bedouin Arab 
in the desert, who thinks he has found a sack 
of pease and opens it eagerly ; but, alas ! they 
are only pearls! With what discontent did 
the audience of Emerson's day inspect his pre- 
cious stones! Even now Matthew Arnold 
shakes his head over them and finds Longfel- 
low's little sentimental poem of "The Bridge" 
worth the whole of Emerson. When we con- 
sider that Byron once accepted meekly his own 
alleged inferiority to Rogers, and that Southey 
ranked himself with Milton and Virgil, and 
only with half-reluctant modesty placed him- 
self below Homer; that Miss Anna Seward and 
her contemporaries habitually spoke of Hay ley 
as '•'• the Mighty Bard," and passed over without 
notice Hayley's eccentric dependant, William 
Blake ; that but two volumes of Thoreau's writ- 
ings were published, greatl}- to his financial 



THE EQUATION OF FAME 93 

loss, during his lifetime, and eight others, 
with four biographies of him, since his death; 
that Willis's writings came into instant accept- 
ance, while Hawthorne's, according to their 
early publisher, attracted ''no attention what- 
ever;" that Willis indeed boasted to Longfel- 
low of making ten thousand dollars a year by 
his pen, when Longfellow wished that he could 
earn one-tenth of that amount, — we must cer- 
tainly admit that the equation of fame may 
require many years for its solution. Fuller 
says in his "Holy State"' that ''learning hath 
gained most by those books on which the print- 
ers have lost;'' and if this is true of learning, 
it is far truer of that incalculable and often 
perplexing gift called genius. 

Young Americans write back from London 
that thev wish thev had crone there in the 
palmy days of literary society — in the days 
when Dickens and Thackeray were yet alive, 
and when Tennyson and Browning were in 
their prime, instead of waiting until the pres- 
ent period, when Rider Haggard and Oscar 
Wilde are regarded, they say, as serious and 
important authors. But just so men looked 



94 THE NEW WOKLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

back ill longing from that earlier day to the 
period of Scott and Wordsworth, and so farther 
and farther and farther. It is easy for older 
men to recall when Thackeray and Dickens 
were in some measure obscured by now forgot- 
ten contemporaries, like Harrison Ainsworth 
and G. P. R. James, and when one was gravely 
asked whether he preferred Tennyson to Ster- 
ling or Trench or Alford or Faber or Milnes. 
It is to me one of the most vivid reminiscences 
of my Harvard College graduation (in 1841) 
that, having rashly ventured upon a commence- 
ment oration whose theme was "Poetry in an 
Unpoetical Age," I closed with an urgent ap- 
peal to young poets to " lay down their Spenser 
and Tennyson," and look into life for them- 
selves. Prof. Edward T. Channing, then the 
highest literary authority in New England, 
paused in amazement with ujilifted pencil over 
this combination of names. "You mean," he 
said, "that they should neither defer to the 
highest authority nor be influenced by the 
lowest?" When I persisted, with the zeal of 
seventeen, that I had no such meaning, but 
regarded them both as among the gods, he said 



THE EQUATION OF FAME 95 

good-naturedly, ''Ah! that is a different thing. 
I wish you to say what you think. I regard 
Tennyson as a great calf, but you are entitled 
to your own opinion." The oration met with 
much applause at certain passages, including 
this one; and the applause was just, for these 
passages were written by my elder sister, 
who had indeed suggested the subject of the 
whole address. But I fear that its only value 
to posterity will consist in the remark it eli- 
cited from the worthy professor; this comment 
affording certainly an excellent milestone for 
Tennyson's early reputation. 

It is worth while to remember, also, that 
this theory of calfhood, like most of the early 
criticisms on Tennyson, had a certain founda- 
tion in the affectations and crudities of these 
lii-st fruits, long since shed and ignored. That 
was in the period of the two thin volumes, 
with their poem on the author's room, now 
quotable from memory only : — 

" Ob, darling room, my heart's delight! 
Dear room, the apple of ray sight! 
AVith thy two couches soft and white, 
There is no room so exquisite, 
No little room so warm and bright, 
Wherein to read, wherein to write." 



96 THE NEW WOP.LD AND THE NEW BOOK 

I do not count it to the discredit of my mentor, 
after the lapse of half a century, that he dis- 
cerned in this something which it is now the 
fashion to call ." veal." Similar lapses helped 
to explain the early under-estimate of the Lake 
school of poets in England, and Margaret 
Fuller's early criticisms on Lowell. On the 
other hand, it is commonly true that authors 
temj)orarily elevated, in the first rude attempts 
to solve the equation of fame, have afforded 
some reason, liowever inadequate, for their 
over-appreciation. Theophile Gautier, in the 
essay already quoted, says that no man entirely 
dupes his epoch, and there is always some basis 
for the shallowest reputations, though what is 
truly admirable may find men insensible for a 
time. And Joubert. always profounder than 
Gautier, while admitting that popularit}' varies 
with the period (la vogue des Uvres depend du 
goUt des siecles)^ tells us also that only what is 
excellent is held in lasting memory Qa memoire 
n'aime que ce qni est excellent, and winds up 
his essay on the qualities of the writer with 
the pithy motto, "Excel and you will live" 
(excelle et tu vivras) ! 



CONCERNING HIGH-WATER MARKS 97 

XI 

CONCERNING HIGH-WATER MARKS 

TN Eckermanii's conversations with Goethe, 
the poet is described as once sliowing his 
admirer a letter from Zelter which was obvi- 
ously witten in a fortunate hour. Pen, paper, 
handwriting, were all favorable ; so tliat for 
once, Goethe said, there was a true and com- 
plete expression of the man, and })erhaps one 
never again to be obtained in like perfection. 
The student of literature is constantly im- 
pressed with the existence of these single auto- 
graphs, these high-water marks as it were, of 
individual genius. 

"•It is in the perfection and precision of the 
instantaneous line,"Avrote Ruskin in his earlier 
days, "that the claim of immortality is made." 
Dr. Holmes somewhere counsels a young author 
to be wary of the fate that submerges so many 
famous works, and advises him to risk his all 
upon a small volume of poems, among which 
there may be one, conceived in some happy 



98 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

hour, that shall live. After the few great 
reputations there is perhaps no better anchorage 
in the vast sea of fame than a single sonnet like 
that of Blanco White. Since, at the best, 
one's reputation is to be determined by one's 
high-water mark, why not be content with that 
alone? If all but the one best work must 
surely be forgotten, why should the rest be 
called into existence? Let it perish with prize 
poems and Commencement orations, if one can 
only determine in advance which is the single 
and felicitous offspring possessing that precise 
quality which the ^^hysicians name " viability" 
— the capacity to keep itself alive. 

Hajjpily, this is not so difficult as one might 
suppose. It often takes a great while to de- 
termine the comparative merit of authors, — 
indeed, the newspapers are just now saying 
that the late Mr. Tupper had a larger income 
from the sales of his works than Browning, 
Tennyson, and Lowell jointly received, — but 
it does not take so long to determine which 
among an author's Avorks are the best; and it is 
probable that the " Descent of Neptune " in the 
Iliad, and the '' Vision of Helen" in the Aga- 



CONCERNING HrGH-^yATER MARKS 09 

memnoii of vEscliylus, and Sappho's famous 
ode, and the " Birds " of Aristophanes, and the 
" Hylas" of Theocritus, and the " Sparrow" of 
Catullus, and the " De Arte Poetica " of 
Horace were early recognized as being the 
same distinct masterpieces that we now find 
them. It is the tradition that an empress wept 
when Virgil recited his '" Tu Marcellus eris ; " 
and it still remains the one passage in the 
jEneid that calls tears to the eye. After all, 
contemporary criticism is less trivial than we 
think. "Philosophers," says Novalis, "are the 
eternal Nile-gauges of a tide that has passed 
away, and the only question we ask of them is, 
' How high water? ' " But contemporary criti- 
cism is also a Nile-gauge, and it records high- 
water marks with a curious approach to 
accuracy. 

There was never a time, for instance, when 
Holmes's early poem, " The Last Leaf," was not 
recognized as probably his best, up to the time 
when " The Chambered Nautilus " superseded 
it, and took its place unequivocally as his 
high-water mark. At every author's reading 
it is the crowning desire that Holmes should 



100 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

read the latter of these two poems, though he is 
still permitted to add the former. From the 
moment when Lowell read his " Commemora- 
tion Ode "' at Cambridge, that great poem took 
for him the same position; while out of any 
hundred critics ninety-nine would place the 
"Day in June "as the best of his shorter pas- 
sages, and the "Bigelow Papers,"' of course, 
stand collectively for his humor. Emerson's 
"The Problem" — containing the only verses 
by a living author hung up for contemplation in 
Westminster Abbey — still stands as the high- 
water mark of his genius, although possibly, so 
great is the advantage possessed by a shorter 
poem, it may be superseded at last by his 
" Daughters of Time." No one doubts that 
Bayard Taylor will go down to fame, if at 
all, by his brief " Legend of Balaklava," and 
Julia Ward Howe by her " Battle Hymn of the 
Republic." It is, perhaps, characteristic of the 
even and well-distributed muse of Whittier that 
it is less easy to select his high-water mark; 
but perhaps " My Playmate " comes as near to it 
as anything. Bryant's " Waterfowl " is easily 
selected, and so is Longfellow's " Wreck of the 



CONCERNING HIGH-WATER MARKS 101 

' Hesperus,' " as conveying more sense of shap- 
ing imagination than any other, while " P^van- 
geline '' would, of course, command the majority 
of votes among his longer poems. In some 
cases, as in Whitman's " My Captain, " the 
high-water mark may have been attained pre- 
cisely at the moment when the poet departed 
from his theory and confined himself most nearlj- 
to the laws he was wont to spurn — in this case, 
by coming nearest to a regularity of rhythm. 

The praise generally bestowed on the admir- 
able selections in the " Library of American 
Literature," by Mr. Stedman and Miss Hutch- 
inson, is a proof that there is a certain con- 
sensus of opinion on this subject. Had they 
left out Austin's " Peter Rugg," or Hale's "A 
Man Without a Country," there would have 
been a general feeling of discontent. It would 
have been curious to see if, had these editors 
been forced by public opinion to put in some- 
thing of their own, they would have inserted 
what others would regard as their high-water 
mark. I should have predicted that it would 
be so; and that this would be, in Stedman's 
case, the stanzas beginning — 

" Thou ait mine; thou hast given thy word," 



102 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

and closing witli that unsurpassed poetic sym- 
bol of hopeless remoteness — 

" As the pearl in the depths of the sea 
From the portionless king who would wear it." 

In the case of Miss Hutchinson, her exquisite 
little poem of " The Moth-Song " will be 
equally unmistakable. When Harriet Prescott 
Spofford's first youthful story, " Sir Rohan's 
Ghost," originally appeared, Lowell selected 
from it with strong admiration, in the Atlantic 
Monthly^ the song, "In a Summer Evening;" 
and it still remains the most unequivocal prod- 
uct of her rare but unequal genius. The late 
Helen Jackson placed the poem called " Spin- 
ning" at the head of her volume of " Verses," 
not because it was that which touched the 
greatest depths, but because it seemed to be 
universally accepted as her fullest, maturest, 
and most thoughtful product. Aldrich's noble 
Fredericksburg sonnet, in a somewhat similar 
way, stands out by itself; it seems to differ 
in kind rather than degree from the " airy 
rhyme " of which he is wont to be the " en- 
amored architect;" its texture is so firm, its 
cadence so grand, that it seems more and more 



CONCERNING HIGH-WATER MARKS 103 

likely to rank as being, next to Lowell's Ode, 
the most remarkable poem called out by the 
Civil War. It is such writing as Keats pro- 
nounced to be " next to fine doing, the top 
thing in the universe;" and we must not 
forget that Wolfe, before Quebec, pronounced 
fine writing to be the greater thing of the two. 
The crowning instances of high-water marks 
are in those poems which, like Blanco White's 
sonnet, alone bear the writer's name down to 
posterity. How completely the truculent Poe 
fancied that he had extinguished for all time 
the poetry of my gifted and wayward kinsman, 
Ellery Channing; and yet it is not at all cer- 
tain that the one closing line of Channing's 
" A Poet's Hope," — 

" If my bark sinks, 'tis to anotlier sea," 

may not secure the immortality it predicts, and 
perhaps outlive everything of Poe's. Wasson's 
fine poem, " Bugle Notes," beginning, — 

" Sweet-voiced Hope, thy fine discourse 
Foretold not half Life's good to me," 

will be, unless I greatly mistake, as lasting as 
the seventeenth-century poems among which it 



104 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

naturally ranks. The mere title, " Some Lov- 
er's Clear Day," of Weiss's poem will endure, 
perhaps, after the verses themselves and all else 
connected with that unique and wayward per- 
sonality are forgotten. It is many years since 
I myself wrote of " that i-are and unappreciated 
thinker, Brown lee Brown ; '' and he is less 
known now than he was then ; yet his poem on 
Immortality, preserved by Stedman and Hutch- 
inson, is so magnificent that it cheapens most 
of its contemporary literature, and seems alone 
worth a life otherwise obscure. It is founded 
on Xenophon's well-known story of the soldiers 
of Cyrus's expedition. " As soon as the men 
who were in the vanguard had climbed the hill 
and beheld the sea, they gave a great shout 
. . . cvying ' Thalatta .' Thalatta ! ' '' 

THE CRY OF THE TEX THOUSAND, 

" I stand upon the summit of my life: 
Behind, the camp, tlie court, the field, the grove, 
The battle and the burden ; vast, afar. 
Beyond these weary ways. Behold, the Sea! 
The sea o'erswept by clouds and winds and wings, 
By thoughts and wishes manifold, whose breath 
Is freshness, and whose mighty pulse is peace. 
Palter no question of the horizon dim, — 
Cut loose the bark; such voyage itself is rest, 
Majestic motion, unimpeded scope, 



CONCERNING HIGH-WATEll MARKS 105 

A widening heaven, a current without care, 
Eternity! — deliverance, promise, course! 
Time-tired souls salute thee from the shore." 

Who knows but that, when all else of Ameri- 
can literature has vanished into forgetfulness, 
some single little masterpiece like this may 
remain to show the high-water mark, not 
merely of a single poet, but of a nation and a 
generation ? 



106 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

XII 

PERSONAL IDEALS 

Q1 IR EDWIN ARNOLD, like most English- 
men of conservative proclivities, thinks 
that we should be better off if we had in this 
country a better supply of "class distinctions." 
He thinks that these distinctions supply to 
Englishmen " respect for authority and certain 
personal ideals which they follow devotedly." 
There is, no doubt, something to be said in 
defence of respect for authority, but everything 
depends upon the selection of the source. As 
a rule, the rich, the contented, the prosjDcrous, 
think that the authority should be their own or 
that of their friends. The poor, the obscure, 
the discontented, are less satisfied with this 
assignment. Now it is useless to say that 
authority in itself is a good thing Avithout 
reference to its origin or its quality. It is 
like saying that scales and weights are a 
good thing, without reference to the question 
who fixed their value. If you weigh by the 



PERSONAL IDEALS 107 

scales of a cheating pedler, then the more au- 
thority you assign to his weights, the worse for 
you; better guess at it or measure out by the 
handfuL We read in Knickerbocker's Neiv 
York that the standard weight of the early set- 
tlers in dealing with the Indians was the 
weight of a Dutchman's foot; and no doubt 
the Indians were told that it was their duty 
to pay reverence to this form of authority. 
In England at the present day the authority is 
not vested in the foot of a Dutchman, but in 
the coronet of a German ; there seems no other 
difference. A word from the Prince of Wales 
in London determines not merely the cut of a 
livery or the wearing of a kid glove, but the 
good repute of an artist or the bad repute of 
an actress. If he beckons a poet across the 
room, the poet feels honored. Indeed, the late 
Mrs. George Bancroft, a keen observer, once 
told me that she never knew an Englishman, 
however eminent in art or science, who, if he 
had dined with a duke, could help mention- 
ing the fact to all his acquaintances. But is 
there anything ennobling in this form of social 
authority ? 



108 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

Now that the human race has reached some 
degree of maturity and self-respect, there is no 
dignity in any tribunal of authority except that 
which a self-governing nation has created for 
itself. Such deference, and such alone, is 
manly. To hnd such deference at its highest 
point, we must look for it in that entertained 
by the American people for its own higher 
courts — courts which it has created, and could 
at any period with a little delay abolish, but 
which it recognizes meanwhile as supreme au- 
thority. This same sentiment has never in 
our day been brought to a test so difficult and 
a result so triumphant as in 1876, when Presi- 
dent Hayes was declared Chief Magistrate. 
Nearly one-half of the American voters hon- 
estly believed at that time that they had been 
defrauded of their rights; but the decision was 
made by a court expressly constituted for the 
purpose, and when made, the decree was self- 
executing, not a soldier being ordered out in 
its support. It is hard to imagine, and perhaps 
not desirable to see, a respect for authority 
more complete than this; for even such respect 
may be too excessive — as many of us discov- 



PERSONAL IDEALS 109 

ered during the fugitive-slave period — and may 
destroy the very liberties it seeks to preserve. 

When it comes to personal ideals, again, 
it makes all the difference in the world whether 
the ideals are to be of the genuine kind, or 
merely composed of a court dress and a few 
jewels. There is something noble in the rev- 
erence for an ideal, even if the object of rever- 
ence be ill-selected. There is a tine passage 
in Heine's fragmentary papers on England, 
where he suddenly comes, among the London 
docks, to a great ship just from some Oriental 
port, breathing of the gorgeous East, and 
manned with a crew of dark Mohammedans of 
many tribes. Weary of the land around him, 
and yearning for the strange world from which 
they came, he yet could not utter a word of 
their language, till at last he thought of a mode 
of greeting. Stretching forth his hands rever- 
ently, lie cried, "Mohammed!" Joy flashed 
over their dark faces, and assuming a reverent 
posture, they answered, " Bonaparte ! "' It mat- 
ters not whether either of these heroes was a 
false prophet, he stood for a personal ideal, such 
as no mere king or nobleman can represent; 



110 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

and such an influence may exist equally under 
any government. Beaconsfield and Gladstone, 
Cleveland and Blaine, represent hosts of sincere 
and unselfish admirers, and, on the other hand, 
of bitter opponents. If the enthusiasm be 
greater in England, so is the hostility; no 
American statesman, not even Jefferson or 
Jackson, ever was the object of such utter and 
relentless execration as was commonly poured 
on Gladstone in England a year or two ago in 
Avhat is called " the best society," where Sir 
Edwin Arnold's ideals are supposed to be most 
prevalent. 

No class distinctions can do anything but 
obscure such ideals as this. The habit of per- 
sonal reverence — such reverence, for instance, 
as the college boy gives to a favorite teacher — 
is not only independent of all social barriers, 
but makes them trivial. I remember that, some 
ten years ago, when I was travelling by rail 
within sight of Princeton College, a young 
fellow next me pointed it out eagerly, and said 
to me, *■' I suppose that there are in that college 
two of the very greatest thinkers of modern 
times." I asked their names, knowing that one 



PERSONAL IDEALS 111 

of them would, of course, be Dr. McCosh, and 
receiving as the other name that of a gentleman 
of whom I had never heard, and whom I have 
now forgotten ; so that my young friend's com- 
pliment may be distributed for what it is 
worth among all those professors who may wish 
to claim it. Such and so honorable was the 
enthusiastic feeling expressed by President 
Garfield toward Mark Hopkins, — that to sit on 
the same log with him was to be in a univer- 
sity, — or the feeling that the Harvard students 
of forty years since had toward James Walker. 
Compare this boyish enthusiasm with the de- 
light of Sir Walter Scott over the possession 
of a wineglass out of which George IV. had 
drunk when Prince Regent ; and remember how 
he carried it home for an heirloom in his fam- 
ily, and sat down on it and broke it after his 
arrival. Which was the more noble way of 
getting at a personal ideal? " There is no 
stronger satire on the proud English society of 
that day," says Thackeray, " than that they 
admired George." When the history of this 
age comes to be written by some critic as fear- 
less as the author of " The Four Georges," does 



112 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

any one doubt that the present Prince of Wales 
— whom even Punch once represented as fol- 
lowing in the steps of his uncle, like Hamlet 
following the ghost, with " Go on! I'll follow 
thee "' — will shift his position as hopelessly as 
did Georsfe the Fourth? "' Which was the 
most splendid spectacle ever witnessed," asks 
Thackeray, " the opening feast of Prince George 
in London, or the resignation of Washington ? " 
After all, it seems, the most eminent of mod- 
ern English literary men has to turn from a 
monarchy to a republic to find a splendid spec- 
tacle. 



ox THE NEED OF A BACKGROUND 113 

XIII 

ON THE NEED OF A BACKGROUND 

IV/TR. R. W. GILDER, in a recent valu- 
able address at Wesleyan University, 
gives a list of nearly a score of younger Ameri- 
can writers, who owe, as he points out, little or 
nothing to the college ; but he leaves the ques- 
tion still open whether it might not be better 
for some of them if they had owed the college 
a little more. Most of those whom he names 
are writers of fiction, an art in which, as in 
poetry, the spark of original genius counts for 
almost everything, and what is called literary 
training for comparatively little. But poetry 
and fiction do not constitute the whole of litera- 
ture. The moment the novelist leaves the little 
world of his own creating and ventures on the 
general ground of literary production, the mo- 
ment he undertakes to write history or philos- 
ophy or criticism, he feels the need of something 
besides creative power, something which may 
be called a literary background. His readers, 



114 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

at any rate, demand for him, if lie does not 
perceive the need of it for himself, that there 
shall be something which suggests a wide and 
flexible training, with large vistas of knowl- 
edge. They like to see in him that " full man " 
who is made, as Lord Bacon says, by "reading." 
One main reason why Homer and Plato and 
Horace and even Dante seem to supply more of 
this kind of fulness than can be got from an 
equivalent study of Balzac and Ruskin, is 
doubtless because the older authors are remoter, 
and so make the vista look more wide. The 
vaster the better ; but there must be enough of 
it, at least, to convey a distinct sensation of 
background. Of course, when this background 
obtrudes itself into the foreground, it becomes 
intolerable; and such books as Burton's "Anat- 
omy of Melancholy " are tiresome, because they 
are all made up of background, and that of the 
craggiest description; but, after all, the books 
which offer only foreground are also insufficient. 
I do not see how any one can read the essays of 
Howells and James and Burroughs, for instance, 
after reading those of Emerson or Lowell or 
Thoreau, without noticing in the younger trio 



ON THE NEED OF A BACKGROUND 115 

a somewhat narrowed range of allusion and 
illustration; a little deficiency in that mellow 
richness of soil which can be made onl}- out of 
the fallen leaves of many successive vegetations; 
a want, in fact, of background. 

It is to be readily admitted that there is no 
magic in a college, and that any writer who has 
a vast love of knowledge may secure his back- 
ground for himself, as did, for example, Theo- 
dore Parker. Yet he cannot obtain it without 
what is, in some sense, the equivalent of a 
college ; long early years spent in various 
studies, and especially in those liberal pursuits 
formerly known as the Humanities. No doubt 
there is much material accessible in other Avays, 
as by wide travel, or even in the forecastle or 
on a ranch. But, after all, the main preserva- 
tive of knowledge is in the art of printing; 
and while the merely bookish man may never 
make a writer, there is nothing that so en- 
riches prose-writing as some background of 
book-knowledge. In case of old Burton, just 
mentioned, the book-knowledge clearly mas- 
tered the man ; and the same is the case with 
one who might perhaps have been the most 



1 16 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

fascinating of modern English authors had not 
his own library proved too much for him — the 
Roman Catholic Digby. The inability to cope 
with his own knowledge has been in his case 
fatal to renown ; his " Broad Stone of Honor " 
is known to many a lover of good books in 
America; yet when I was tr3dng to find him in 
London, I discovered that Froude had never 
even heard his name. It is the Nemesis of 
learning ; a man who cannot cope with his own 
attainments is like the Norse giant who was 
suffocated by his own wisdom and had to be 
relieved by a siphon. But even he may help 
others, whereas the man who writes without a 
background of knowledge gives but a superfi- 
cial aid to anybod3% although his personality 
considered as a mere foreground may be very 
charming. 

When the writers of Oriental sacred books 
began with the creation of the world, they 
undoubtedly went too far for a background; 
it was also going too far when the House of 
Commons was more displeased by a false Latin 
quantity than by a false argument. I am per- 
fectly willing to concede that much time has 



ON THE NEED OF A BACKGROUND 117 

been wasted, in times past, on the niceties of 
classical scholarship; and, moreover, that what 
is most valuable in Greek and Roman literature 
has been so transfused into the modern litera- 
tures that it is no longer so important as for- 
merly to seek it at the fountain-head. It seems 
only a fine old-fashioned whim when we read of 
the desire of Dr. Popkin, the old Greek Profes- 
sor at Harvard College, to retire from teaching 
and " read the authors," meaning thereby the 
Greeks alone. The authors who are worth 
reading have now increased to a number that 
would quite dismay the good professoi-; but the 
more one has read, the better for his literary 
background. It is necessary to use the past 
tense, for the need must commonly have been 
supplied in early life ; and this implies either 
a college or its equivalent; that is, a period 
when one reads voraciously, without any limi- 
tation but in the number of hours in the day, 
and without any immediate necessity of literary 
production. 

One sees but few men — I can claim to have 
personally known but one. the historian, Francis 
Parkman — for whom a perfectly well-defined 



118 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW BOOK 

literary purpose has shajDed itself in early years 
and has proved the adequate task of a lifetime. 
This is not ordinarily to be expected, or even 
desired. Some men simj)ly fill in a wide back- 
ground without the possibility of predicting 
where the foreground of their intellectual work 
will lie. No matter; they may at any moment 
reap the advantage of this early breadth. There 
are no departments of study which are more apt 
to prove useful in the end than those on which 
Time has for a while set up the sign JVo Thor- 
oughfare. It has been said that no one is rich 
in knowledge who cannot afford to let two- 
thirds of it lie fallow ; nor can any one tell in 
which particular field he may at any moment be 
called on to. resume production, or, at least, to 
take the benefit of some early harvest that w^as 
merely ploughed in. 

While I am therefore proud, as an American, 
of the clever writing and even of the genius of 
many of the authors who owe nothing to col- 
leges; and while I rejoice to see it demon- 
strated as has been shown by Mr. Howells and 
Mr. James, that much of the strength and deli- 
cacy of English style can be attained Avithout 



ON THE NEED OF A BACKGROUND 119 

early academic training; I think that it is un- 
safe to let our criticism stop here. We need 
the advantage of the background; the flavor of 
varied cultivation ; the depth of soil that comes 
from much early knowledge of a great many 
books. This does not involve pedantry, al- 
though it is possible to be pedantic even in 
fiction, as Victor Hugo's endless and tiresome 
soliloquizers show. The deeper the sub-soil is, 
the more diligently the farmer must break it 
up ; he must not prefer a shallower loam to save 
trouble in ploughing. The two things must be 
combined, — intellectual capital and labor; ac- 
cumulation and manipulation; background and 
foreground. Addison's fame rests partly on 
the three folio volumes of materials which he 
collected before beginning the Spectator; but 
it rests also on the lightness of touch that made 
him Addison. 



120 THE NEW WOKLD AND THE NEW BOOK 



XIV 

UNNECESSARY APOLOGIES 

^T^HE newspaper critics seem to me mistaken 
in attributing the favorable reception of 
Mr. Bryce's admirable book on the " American 
Commonwealth " to a diminished national sen- 
sitiveness. It is certain that this sensitiveness 
has greatly diminished, and certain also that 
Mr. Bryce gives us plenty of praise. But the 
main difference seems to lie in this, that Mr. 
Bryce treats us as a subject for serious study, 
and not as a primary class for instruction in 
the rudiments of morals and grannnar. The 
usual complaint made by us against English 
writers is the same now as in the days of 
Dickens, that they come here chiefly to teach 
and not to inquire. No man had so many 
foreign visitors in his time as the late Professor 
Longfellow, and there never lived a man in 
whom the element of kindly charity more pre- 



UNNECESSARY APOLOGIES 121 

vailed ; yet he records in his diary ^ his surprise 
that so few foreigners apparently desire any 
information about this country, while all have 
much to communicate on the subject. The 
reason why every one reads with pleasure even 
the censiu'es of Mr. Bryce is because he has 
really taken the pains to learn something about 
us. There is probably no American author 
who has traversed this continent so widely and 
repeatedly; there is perhaps no one who has 
made so careful a comparative study of the State 
governments ; and there is certainly no one who 
could re-enforce this comparison by so careful a 
study of popular government in other times and 
places. To say that his book will supersede De 
Tocqueville is to say little ; it is better for the 
present period than was De Tocqueville for any 
period; because it is as clear, as candid, and 
incomparably more thorough. 

All this refers to the main theme of Mr. 
Bryce'sbook; but there is one criticism yet to 
be made upon it. It is to be regretted that he 
was ever tempted from his main ground, where 
he is so strong, to a collateral ground, where 

1 January 16, 1845. 



122 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

he is weaker. It was not, perhaps, necessary 
that he should treat of American literature at 
all ; at any rate, it is safe to say that his chapter 
on this subject has a perfunctory air; it seems 
like the work of a tired man, who feels that he 
ought to say something on that point, yet does 
not care to grapple with it as with his main 
question ; and so puts us off with vague and 
needless, though kindly apologies. He is so 
ready to find good reasons for our doing no more, 
that he takes no pains to analyze or weigh what 
we have done ; and unfortunately the habit of 
colonial deference is still so strong among us, 
that we are more disposed to be grateful to such 
a kindly apologist than to question his words. 
It has been a lifelong conviction with me that 
the injury done to American literature by the 
absence of a copyright law is a trivial thing 
compared with the depressing influence of this 
prolonged attitude of dependence: an attitude 
which has disappeared from our political insti- 
tutions, but still exists in regard to books. 
To test it we have only to reverse in imagi- 
nation the nationality of a few authors and 
critics, and consider what a change of estimate 



UNNECESSARY APOLOGIES 123 

such an altered origin would involve. Let us 
make, for instance, the great effort of supposing 
Emerson an English author and Matthew Ar- 
nold an American; does any one suppose that 
Arnold's criticisms on Emerson would in that 
case have attracted very serious attention in 
either country? Had Mr. Gosse been a New 
Yorker, writing in a London magazine, would 
any one on either side of the Atlantic have 
seriously cared whether Mr. Gosse thought that 
contemporary England had produced a poet? 
The reason why the criticisms of these two 
Englishmen have attracted such widespread 
notice among us is that they have the accumu- 
lated literary weight — the ex oriente lux — of 
London behind them. We accept them meekly 
and almost reverently; just as we even accept 
the criticisms made on Grant and Sheridan by 
Lord Wolseley, who is, compared to either of 
these generals, but a carpet knight. It is in 
some such way that we must explain the meek 
gratitude with which our press receives it, 
when Mr. Bryce apologizes for our deficiencies 
in the way of literature. 

Mr. Bryce — whom, it is needless to say, I 



124 THE NE^y world and the new book 

regard with hearty admiration, and I can add 
with personal affection, since he has been my 
guest and I have been his — Mr. Bryce has a 
chapter on " Creative Intellectual Power," in 
which he has some capital remarks on the im- 
possibility of saying why great men appear in 
one time or place and not in another — in 
Florence, for instance, and not in Naples or 
Milan. Then he goes on to say that there is 
" no reason why the absence of brilliant genius 
among the sixty millions in the United States 
should excite any surprise," and adds soon 
after, " It is not to be made a reproach against 
America that men like Tennyson or Darwin 
have not been born there." Surely not; nor 
is it a reproach against England that men like 
Emerson or Hawthorne have not been born 
there. But if this last is true, why did it not 
occur to Mr. Bryce to say it; and had he said 
it, is it not plain that the whole tone and state- 
ment of his proposition would have been differ- 
ent? It occurs to him to specify Darwin and 
Tennyson, but the two men who above all 
others represent creative intellectual power, up 
to this time, in America, are not so much as 
named in his whole chapter of thirteen pages. 



UNNECESSARY APOLOGIES 125 

Of course it is too early for comparison, but 
it is undoubtedly the belief of many Americans 
— at any rate, it is one which I venture to enter- 
tain — that the place in the history of intellect 
held a hundred years hence by the two Ameri- 
cans he forgets to mention Avill be greater than 
that of the two Englishmen he names. Greater 
than Darwin's, from the more lasting quality of 
literary than of scientific eminence. Darwin 
was great, as he was certainly noble and lov- 
able; but he was not greater, or at least held 
greater, than Newton : — 

'• Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night, 
God said, ' Let Newton be,' and all was light." 

More than this could surely not be said for 
Darwin; and yet how vague and dim is now 
the knowledge, even among educated men, of 
precisely what it was that Newton accomplished, 
compared with the continued knowledge held 
by every school-boy as to Pope, who wrote the 
lines just quoted. The mere record of Darwin's 
own life shows how large a part of man's high- 
est mental action became inert in him. He 
ceased to care for the spheres of thought in 



126 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

which Emerson chiefly lived; while, on the 
other hand, the tendencies and results of Dar- 
win's thought were always an object of interest 
to Emerson. 

When we turn to Tennyson the comparison 
must proceed on different grounds, and takes 
us back to Coleridge's fine definition of inspi- 
ration, given half a century ago in his " Con- 
fessions of an Inquiring Spirit." " What- 
ever finds me,'' he wrote, " at a greater depth 
than usual, that is inspired." It is because 
Emerson in his way and Hawthorne in his way 
touch us at greater depths than Tennyson that 
their chance for immortality is stronger. Form 
is doubtless needed in the expression; but in 
Hawthorne there is no defect of form, and the 
frequent defects of tliis kind in Emerson are 
balanced by tones and cadences so noble that 
the exquisite lyre of Tennyson, taken at its 
best, has never reached them. I do not object 
to the details of treatment in Mr. Bryce's chap- 
ter, and it contains many admirable sugges- 
tions; but it seems to me that he might well 
preface it, in a second edition, by some such 
remark — ■ addressed to some fancied personifica- 



UNNECESSARY APOLOGIES 127 

tion of American Literature — as Enobarbus, 
in '• Antony and Cleopatra," makes to Pom- 
pey: — 

"Sir, 
I never loved you much: but I have praised you 
When you have well deserved ten times as much 
As I have said you did." 



128 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

XV 

THE PERILS OF AMERICAN HUMOR 

^^rOTHING strikes an American more, on 
his first visit to England, than the fre- 
quent discussion of American authors who 
are rarely quoted at home, except in stump- 
speeches, and whose works hardly have a place 
as yet in our literary collections, and who still 
are taken seriously among educated persons in 
England. Tlie astonishment increases when 
he finds the almanacs of "Josh Billings" re- 
printed in "Libraries of American Humor," 
and given an equal place with the writings of 
Holmes and Lowell. Finally he is driven to 
the conclusion that there must be very little 
humor in England, where things are seriously 
published in book form which here would only 
create a passing smile in the corner of a news- 
paper. He finds that the whole deijartment of 
American humor was created, so to speak, by the 
amazed curiosity of Englishmen. It is a phrase 
that one rarely hears in the United States; and 



THE PERILS OF AMERICAN HUMOR 129 

if we have such a thing among us, although it 
may cling to our garments, we are habitually 
as unconscious of it as are smokers of the per- 
fume of their favorite weed. When attention 
is once called to it, however, we are compelled 
to perceive it, and may then look at it both 
from the dt^sirable and undesirable sides, since 
both of these sides it has. 

There is certainly no defence or water-proof 
garment against adverse fortune which is, on 
the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of 
humor. The man v,'\\o has it can i-arely be cast 
down for a great while by external events; and 
it is much the same with a nation. For some 
reason or other, in the transplantation to this 
continent, certain traits were heightened and 
certain other qualities were diminished among 
the English-speaking race. Thus much may 
be safely assumed. Among the heightened 
attributes was the sense of humor; and to this, 
no doubt, some of our seeming virtues may 
be attributed. 

The good-nature of an American crowd, the 
long-suffering- of American travellers under 
detention or even fraud, the recoil of cheer- 



130 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

fulness after the tremendous excitement of a 
national election — all these things are partly 
due to the national habit of looking not so 
much at the bright side as at the amusing side 
of all occurrences. The day after election the 
most heated partisan, beaten or victorious, not 
only laughs at the other party, but he laughs 
at his own; he laughs at himself; and this atti- 
tude of mind, which carried Abraham Lincoln 
through the vast strain of civil war and eman- 
cipation, is an almost essential trait of life in a 
republic. Public men who have this quality 
are able to thrive on the very wear and tear of 
political life; public men who are without it, 
as the late Charles Sumner, find the path of 
duty hard, and are kept up by sheer conscience 
and will. And so in private life, the husband 
and wife who have no mutual enjoyment of 
this kind, the parents who derive no delight 
from the droll side of nursery life and the per- 
petual unconscious humor of childhood, must 
find daily existence monotonous and wearing. 
It was from this point of view that one of the 
cleverest and most useful women I have ever 
known, the late Mrs. Delano Goddard, of 



THE PERILS OF AMERICAN HUMOR 131 

Boston, when asked what quality on the whole 
best promoted one's usefulness in life, replied, 
"The sense of humor/' 

But when this sense of humor is, as one may 
say, nationalized, it furnishes some occasional 
disadvantages to set against this merit. It 
may not only be turned against good causes, 
but against the whole attitude of earnest study 
or faithful action. Mr. Warner has lately 
pointed out how not merely the external repu- 
tation of Chicago has been injured, but its 
whole intellectual life retarded, by the deter- 
mined habit of the newspapers of that city in 
treating all intellectual efforts coming from that 
quarter as a joke. " When Chicago makes up 
her mind to take hold of culture," said one of 
the local humorists, "she will just make cul- 
ture hum." Of course it might seem that 
every word of this vigorous sentence must serve 
to put culture a little farther off. But, as a 
matter of fact, culture is already there, in 
Chicago. There is probably no city in the 
Union which publishes books of a higher grade, 
in proportion to their numbers. Looking on 
the fly-leaf of a new London edition of Sir 



132 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

Philip Sidney's "Astropliel and Stella," the 
other day, I was not at all surprised to find 
that, of the thousand copies printed, one- 
quarter were for the American market, and 
that these were to be issued from Chicago. 
And yet so fixed is this habit of joking in the 
mind of our people that it will probably last an 
indefinite period into the future, and keep all 
the intellectual impulses of that particular city 
in the kind of uncomfortable self-consciousness 
Avhicli comes fi'om l)eing always on the defen- 
sive. In time such an attitude is outgrown, 
and people are left to enj(\y what they like. I 
can remember when the disposition of Bosto- 
nians to take pleasure in Beethoven's sym- 
phonies was almost as much of a joke to Boston 
editors as is the "humming" of culture in 
Chicago to-day ; but there is fortunately a limit 
to human endurance in regard to certain partic- 
ular witticisms, though some of them certainly 
die hard. 

The same necessity for a joke invades other 
quiet enjoyments and harmless occupations, as 
the study of Shakespeare or Browning. It has 
happened to me to look in at several different 



THE PERILS OF AMERICAN HUMOR 133 

Browning clubs, first and last; but the club of 
the newspaper humorist I never have happened 
to encounter — that club which is as vague and 
misty and wordy as that other creation of the 
American imagination, the "Limekiln Club" 
of colored philosophers. On the contrary, such 
Browning clubs as I have happened to look in 
upon have had the sobriety and reasonableness 
which are essential to the study of a poet who, 
although often recondite and difficult, is never 
vague. Yet you may go to the meeting of such 
a club and be struck with the good-sense and 
moderation of every word that is uttered; no 
matter; the report in the next day's newspaper 
— if reporters are admitted — will put in all 
the folly and adulation that the meeting wisely 
left out, and this because the reporter is 
expected to exhibit humor. It is worse yet 
when serious public discussions or the terrible 
details of police courts are burlesqued in this 
way. Few things, I should say, are more 
essentially demoralizing than the facetious 
police report of the enterprising daily news- 
paper. The moral of it all is that humor, like 
fire, is a good servant but a bad master ; that it 



134 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

refreshes and relieves the hard work of life, and 
is meant to do so in the order of nature ; but 
when it becomes an end in itself it takes the 
real dignity from life, and actually makes its 
serious work harder. 



PROPOSED ABOLITION OF THE PLOT 135 



XVI 

ON THE PROPOSED ABOLITION OF 
THE PLOT 

"TT was said of the romantic Muse in Germany 
— of the Pegasus, or winged horse of 
Uhhind — that, like its colleague, the famous 
war-horse Bayard, it possessed all possible vir- 
tues and but one fault, that it was dead. It is 
in this decisive way that Mr. Howells and 
others deal with the plot in stories and dramas; 
they decline to argue the matter, but simply 
assert that the plot is extinct. If any one 
doubts the assertion they would perhaps still 
decline to argue the matter, and simply extend 
the assertion to any critic who differed from 
them, pointing out that he must be dead also. 
It may be so, since there may always be 
room for such a possibility. '' Tyrawley and 
I," said Walpole's old statesman, "have been 
dead these two years; but we don't let anybody 
know it." In the matter of literary criticism, 
however, the fact is just the other way. The 



136 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

critics who cling to the plot are not aware of 
their own demise ; but Mr. Howells has found 
it out. To find it out is justly to silence them ; 
for, as Charles Lamb says in his poem exempli- 
fying "the lapidary style," which the late Mr. 
Mellish never could abide : — 

" It matters very little what Mellish said, 
Because he is dead." 

But if we grant for a moment, as a matter 
of argument, that whatever yet speaks may be 
regarded, for controversial purposes, as being 
alive, it may be well enough pointed out, that, 
if plot is dead and only characters survive, then 
there is a curious divergence in this age be- 
tween the course of literature and the course of 
science. If anything marks the science of the 
age it is that plot is everything. Museums 
were formerly collections of detached speci- 
mens, only classified for convenience under a 
few half -arbitrary divisions. One may still see 
such collections surviving, for instance, in that 
melancholy hall through which people pass, as 
rapidly as possible, to reach the modern theatre 
known as the Boston Museum. But in all 



PROPOSED ABOLITION OF THE PLOT 137 

natural history museums of any pretensions, 
the individual specimen is subordinated to the 
whole. The great Agassiz collection at Har- 
vard is expressly named " The Museum of Com- 
parative Zoology." In the Peabody Museum at 
Yale — in which, as Charles Darwin told me, 
quoting Huxley, there is more to be learned 
than from all the museums of Europe — you are 
not sho^Yn the skeleton of a horse, and left with 
that knowledge, l)ut you are shown every step 
in the development of the horse from the time 
wlien, in pre-historic periods, he was no larger 
than a fox and had five toes. In science, plot 
is not only not ignored, but it is almost every- 
thing; only it is not called plot, it is called 
evolution. 

And conversely, what is called evolution in 
science is called plot in fiction. Grant that 
character is first in importance, as it doubtless 
is, yet plot is the development of character. It 
is not enough to paint Arthur Dimmesdale, 
standing with his hand on his heart and despair 
in his eyes; to paint the hand anatomically 
correct, the eyes deep in emotion ; but we need 
to know what brought him there; what pro- 



138 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

duced the strange combination, a Puritan Saint 
with a conscience wrung into distortion. Lear 
is not Lear, Hamlet not Hamlet, without a 
glimpse at the conditions that have made them 
what they are. With the worst villains of the 
play, we need, as Margaret Fuller profoundly 
said, to "hear the excuses men make to them- 
selves for their worthlessness." But these 
conditions, these excuses, constitute the plot. 

It is easy enough to dismiss plot from the 
scene, if it means only a conundrum like 
that in "The Dead Secret," or a series of 
riddles like the French detective novels. In 
these the story is all, there is no character 
worth unravelling ; and when we have once got 
at the secret the book is thrown away. But 
where the plot is a profound study of the devel- 
opment of character, it can never be thrown 
away; and unless we have it, the character is 
not really studied. What we do at any given 
moment is largely the accumulated result of all 
previous action; and that action again comes 
largely from the action of those around us. 
"We are all members one of another." Just 
as we are all learning this in political economy, 



PROPOSED ABOLITION OF THE PLOT 139 

are we to drop it out of view in fiction ? The 
thought or impulse that springs into ray mind 
or heart this instant has been largely moulded 
by a hundred men and women, living or dead ; 
if the novelist or the dramatist wishes to por- 
tray me, he must include them also. Other- 
wise the picture is as hopelessly detached and 
isolated as the figure in this sketch that a very 
young artist has just brought me in from the 
seaside — -a little boy standing at the apex of 
a solitary rock, fishing in the ocean ; the whole 
vast sea around him, but not a living thing 
near him — not even a fish. 

We all find ourselves, as we come into 
mature society and take our part in life, sur- 
rounded by a network of event and incident, 
one-tenth public and nine-tenths private. If 
we have warm hearts and observant minds we 
are pretty sure to be entangled in this net- 
work. By middle life, every person who has 
seen much of the world is acquainted with 
secrets that would convulse the little circle 
around him, if told ; and might easily eclipse 
all the novels, if the very complication of the 
matter did not forbid utterance. As no painter, 



140 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

it is said, ever dared paint the sunset as bright 
as it often is, so the most thrilling novelist un- 
derstates the mystery and entanglement in the 
actual world around him. If he is cautious, 
he may well say, as the Duke of Wellington 
is said to have remarked when meditating his 
autobiography: "I should like to sjDeak the 
truth; but if I do, I shall be torn in pieces." 
If our realists would say frankly: "We should 
like to draw plots such as we have actually 
known; but we dare not do it, let us therefore 
abolish the plot," their position would be far 
more intelligible. Miss Alcott's heroine, in 
writing her first stories, finds wdth surprise 
that all the things she has taken straight from 
real life are received with incredulity; and 
only those drawni wholly from her internal con- 
sciousness are believed at all. Life goes so 
much beyond fiction that those who are brought 
up mainly on the latter diet are more apt to 
encounter something in life which eclipses fic- 
tion than something which seems tame in com- 
parison. And, on the other hand, Avhen we 
put real events into the form of fiction, they 
seem over- wrought and improbable. 



PROPOSED ABOLITION OF THE PLOT 141 

Much of this applies, of course, to charac- 
ter as well as to plot. The seeming contra- 
dictions in the character of Hamlet, over 
which the critics have wrangled for a century 
or two, are not really so great or improbable as 
tliose to be found in many youths who pass for 
commonplace ; and that man's experience is 
limited who has not encountered, in his time, 
Avomen of more "infinite variety" than Shake- 
speare's Cleopatra. Character in real life is 
a far more absorbing study than character in 
fiction ; and when it comes to plot, fiction is 
nowhere in comparison. Toss a skein of thread 
into the sea, and within twenty-four hours the 
waves and the floating seaweed will have 
tangled it into a knot more })erplexing than 
the utmost effort of your hands can weave ; and 
so the complex plots of life are wound by the 
currents of life itself, not by the romancers. 
If life thus provides them, they are a part of 
life, and must not be omitted when there is a 
pretence at its delineation. I once heard an 
eloquent preacher (\V. H. Channing) express 
the opinion that we should spend a considerable 
part of eternity in unravelling the strange his- 



142 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

tory of one another's lives. It might be easy, 
perhaps, to • devise more profitable ways of 
spending eternity; but there is no doubt that 
the pursuit he proposes, if we undertook it, 
would occupy a good many ages of that period. 
It would be necessary, however, to stipulate 
that none of it should be given to us in the 
form of autobiography, since we have altogether 
too much of that offered to us in this life. To 
make our friends really interesting, we must 
be allowed to explore their secrets in spite of 
them, and perhaps against their direct oppo- 
sition. 

Of course we all view this drama of life 
around us through a medium varying with our 
temperaments. Heine says that he once went 
to see the thrilling tragedy of "ia Tour de 
Nesle^"" in Paris, aud sat behind a lady who 
wore a large hat of rose-red gauze. The hat 
obstructed his whole view of the stage ; he saw 
the play only through it, and all the horror of 
the tragedy was transformed b\" the most cheer- 
ful roselight. Some of us are hap]3y in having 
this rose-tinted veil in our temperaments ; but 
the plot and the tragedy are there. " The inno- 



PROPOSED ABOLITION OF THE PLOT 143 

cent," says Thoreau speaking of life, "enjoy 
the story." They should be permitted to enjoy 
it, which they cannot do unless they have it. 
Grant that character is the important thing; 
but character will soon dwindle and its deline- 
ation grow less and less interesting, if we 
detach it from life. We are all but coral- 
insects or sea-anemones forming a part of one 
great joint existence, and we die and dry up if 
torn from the reef where we belong. 



144 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

XVII 

AMERICAN TRANSLATORS 

npHE English-speaking race lias a strong- 
instinct for translation, extending through 
both its branches. Miss Mitford says of one of 
her heroes in a country town, " He translated 
Horace, as all gentlemen do; '" and Mrs. Austin 
speaks of Goethe's "Faust " as "that untrans- 
latable poem which every Englishman trans- 
lates." Americans are not behind their British 
cousins in these labors; and Professor Boyesen 
— who, as a Norseman by birth and an Ameri- 
can by adoption, is free of all languages — has 
written an agreeable paper in Book News ^ on 
the general subject of translations. In this he 
says that America has produced three of the 
greatest translators of modern times; a state- 
ment which every patriotic American would 
perhaps indorse, were he himself only allowed 
to make the selection. To two out of three of 
Mr. Boyesen's favorites I should certainly take 

1 August, 1888. 



AMERICAN TRANSLATORS 145 

decided objection ; and, curiously enough, 
should nominate as substitutes two other 
translators of the very books he selects as 
test-subjects for rendering. 

About Longfellow there can be no difference 
of opinion. He seems to me, as to Mr. Boyesen, 
to rank tirst among those who have made trans- 
lations into the English tonofue. He alone 
avoids the perpetual difference between literal 
and poetic versions by absolutely combining 
the two methods: a thing which Mr. Boyesen 
thinks — but, I sliould say, mistakenly — can- 
not be done. Mr. Boyesen's dictum that "no 
poetic translation can be good and literal at the 
same time," is refuted by the very existence of 
Longfellow, whose instinct for the transference 
of his author's lano-viagfe seemed like a sixth 
sense or a special gift for that one purpose. 
Placing side by side his German ballads and 
their originals, one neither detects anything of 
Longfellow put in nor anything of LThland or 
Heine left out. The more powerful and com- 
manding class of translators insert themselves 
into the work of their authors; thus Chapman 
so Chapmanizes Homer that in the long run his 



146 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

version fails to give pleasure; and Fiztgerald 
has whole lines in his "Agamemnon" which 
are not in ^schylus and are almost indistin- 
guishable in flavor from his "Omar Khayyam." 
Even Mrs. Austin, in that exquisite version 
quoted by Longfellow in his "Hyperion," 
beginning 

" Many a year is in its grave," 

has infused into it a tinge of dreamy sentiment 
slightly beyond that conveyed by Uhland in the 
original. 

It is perhaps more beautiful, as it stands, 
than any of Longfellow's ballad-versions; but 
it is less perfect as a rendering. It is possible 
that Longfellow's own method swerved a little, 
in his later years, toward over-literalness. 
There are many who prefer the freer and more 
graceful movement of his " Vision of Beatrice " 
in the "Ballads and other Poems" to the 
stricter measure of the same passage in his com- 
pleted translation. This last work has truly, 
as Mr. Boyesen says, an air of constraint ; but 
I think he is in error in attributing this quality 
to the influence of those who met to criticise 



AMERICAN TRANSLATORS 147 

Longfellow's work; it was rather due to the 
strong hold taken, by the theory of a literal 
rendering, on the poet's mind. Over-literal- 
ness appears to be the Nemesis of a genius for 
translating; the longer a man works, the more 
precise he becomes. 

The second of Mr. Boyesen's great American 
translators is Bryant ; and here I should utterly 
dissent from him. The best introduction to 
Homer in English is Matthew Arnold's " Essay 
on Translating Homer; " or rather it would be, 
but for its needless and diffuse length, which 
prevents many persons from really mastering 
it ; but I do not see how any one, after reading 
it, can look through a page of Bryant's version 
without a sense of its utter tameness and its 
want of almost all the qualities defined by 
Arnold as essential to Homer. Mr. Lawton 
has finely said, at the beginning of his admir- 
able papers on JEschylus in the Atlantic 
Monthly 1 that " the Homeric poems offer us, as 
it were, a glimpse of a landscape scene by a 
flash of lightning. What came before and 
immediately after we cannot discern." But in 

1 August, 1888. 



148 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

Bryant's translation there is substituted for the 
flash of lightning the very mildest moonlight; 
and there seems no particular reason, from any- 
thing in the tone or flavor of his narrative, 
why the whole series of events should not have 
taken place on Staten Island. Mr. Bryant 
undoubtedly had, in his youth, something of 
Longfellow's gift for translation; his early 
Spanish ballads had in them much promise ; 
they were as good as Lockhart's, perhaps better. 
But his "Iliad" and " Odyssey " were an old 
man's work, done with mechanical regularity, 
so many lines a day; and while they are "grave 
and dignified," as his critic says, they are 
Homer with the fire of Homer — or, in other 
words, with Homer himself — left out. But 
the real translator of the Father of Poetry is, 
in my judgment, one whom Mr. Boyesen does 
not name, and perhaps does not yet know, so 
recently has the first instalment of his great 
Avork appeared — Prof. G. H. Palmer. For 
the last half-dozen years it has been the greatest 
intellectual pleasure afforded by a residence 
near Harvard University to follow with the 
Greek text the public readings of Professor 



AMERICAN TRANSLATORS 149 

Palmer from the "Odyssey." These readings 
Avere given so simply, with such quiet and 
sustained animation, that it all seemed like an 
extempore performance ; and all the incidents 
were told with such utter freshness that they 
might liavc just arrived as news by telegraph. 
This English text is published; it is cast, with 
consummate art, in a sort of rhythmic prose, 
perfectly simple, yet measured, and securing, 
perhaps, the nearest approach that can be had 
in English to the actual rhythm of Homer. 
Professor Palmer will now have to solve the 
further and more difficult problem, whether the 
stronger and richer measure of the "Iliad" can 
be dealt with in the same way. But the work 
already done is one of the monumental works of 
American scholarslii[); and although it stands 
to the eye as a prose version, and might at first 
be hastily classed with a translation so incom- 
parably inferior to it as that of Butcher and 
Lang, yet it is really as literal as that, while 
achieving at least half the interval, whatever 
that may be, which separates prose from poetry. 
Mr. Boyesen's third great American trans- 
lator is Bayard Taylor. Here again he seems 



150 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

to me to concede too much to labor and not 
enough to genius. As a tour de force, Taylor's 
great work is doubtless monumental, and an 
honor to American scholarship. I remember 
with what regret I noticed that there was no 
copy of it, ten years ago, in the collection 
of Goethean literature in the Gothe-Haus at 
Frankfort, though Taylor's honorary diploma 
was there, and the custodian spoke of him with 
respect. As a translator of the whole work, 
and as a copious commentator and elucidator 
he is entitled to great credit, although his 
abundant notes are taken largely from German 
sources, easily accessible. No Englishman, at 
any rate, has done the same work so well. But 
it is to be remembered that although the trans- 
lation of the Second Part of "Faust," in the 
original metres, taxes severely the ingenuity 
and adroitness of any workman, yet it is in 
dealing with the oft-translated First Part that 
the higher poetic qualities come in; and in this 
Taylor has been easily surpassed, I should say, 
by the late Charles T. Brooks. And while 
Brooks, it is true, stopped short of the longer 
and more laborious Second Part, yet he made 



AMERICAN TRANSLATORS 151 

up for that by his remarkable series of versions 
of the yet more difficult work of Jean Paul 
Richter. These he handled, especially the 
" Hesperus " and "Titan," with a felicity and 
success unequalled among Richter's translators ; 
and it is an illustration of the ignorance in 
England of the successes achieved by Ameri- 
cans in this direction, that Mr. Brooks's works 
of this series are there so little recognized. 
Another remarkable American translator from 
the German is Charles G. Leland, whose ver- 
sion of Heine's Reiseb'dder under the name 
of " Pictures of Travel " is so extraordinarily 
graphic and at the same time so literal that it 
ought of itself to achieve a permanent fame for 
the author of "Hans Breitmann." 



152 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 



XVIII 

THE WESTMINSTER ABBEY OF A 
BOOK CATALOGUE 

n"^HE American visitor enters Westminster 
Abbey prepared to be hushed in awe before 
the multitude of great names. To his amaze- 
ment he finds himself vexed and bored with 
the vast multiplicity of small ones. He must 
approach the Poets' Corner itself through 
avenues of Browns, Joneses, and Robinsons. It 
seems that even Westminster Abbey affords no 
test of greatness, nor do any of the efforts to 
ascertain it by any other test succeed much 
better. The balloting in various newspapers 
for " the best hundred authors " or '' the forty 
immortals " has always turned out to be limited 
by the constituency of the particular publica- 
tion which attempted the experiment; or some- 
times even by the action of jocose cliques, com- 
bining to force up the vote of pet candidates. 
As regards American authors, the great "Li- 



WESTMINSTER OF A BOOK CATALOGUE 153 

brary of American Literature " of Stedman and 
Hutchinson aims to furnish a sort of West- 
minster Abbey or Valhalla, where the relative 
value of different writers may be roughly 
gauged by the number of pages assigned to 
each candidate for fame. But this again is 
determined by the taste of the compilers, and 
their judgment, however catholic, is not infal- 
lible. Still another test, and one coming nearer 
to a general popular consensus may be sought 
in the excellent catalogues which are now pre- 
pared for our public libraries — catalogues in 
which the list of each author's works is supple- 
mented by appending the titles of all books or 
parts of books written about him ; not usually 
including, however, magazine or newspaper 
articles. By simply counting the entries of 
this subsidiary literature which has already 
grown up around each eminent man, we can 
obtain a certain rough estimate of the extent 
and variety of interest inspired by him in the 
public mind. 

Let us take, for instance, one of the best and 
most recent of these catalogues — the large 
quarto volume which enumerates the English 



154 THE KEW WOULD AND THE NEW BOOK 

books in the Cleveland (Ohio) public library. 
This selection is made partly because of the 
thoroughness and excellence of the work itself, 
and partly because, as Emerson once said, 
"Europe stretches to the Alleghanies," and, 
by going west of them, we at least rid our- 
selves of any possible prejudices of the Atlantic 
border, I have carefully counted the list of 
entries in this catalogue under the names of 
many prominent Americans not now living; 
and the results have been such as to surprise 
not merely the present writer, but all with 
whom he has compared notes. No person to 
whom he has put the question has yet suc- 
ceeded in hitting, at a guess, the first four 
names upon the list presently to be given; the 
list, that is, of those under whose names the 
entry of biographical and critical literature is 
largest. The actual table, arranged in order of 
pre-eminence, is as follows, the number follow- 
ing each name representing the number of 
books, or parts of books, referring to the person 
named, and enumerated in the Cleveland cata- 
logue. The actual works of the author himself 
are not included. The list is as follows : — 



WESTMINSTER OF A BOOK CATALOGUE 155 

Washington 48 

Emerson, Lincoln (e;icli) 41 

Franlclin 37 

Webster 34 

Longfellow 33 

Hawthorne 25 

Jefferson . . 23 

Grant 22 

Irving 21 

Clay 19 

Beecher, Poe, M. F. Ossoli (each) ... 16 

Theodore Parker, Lowell (each) .... 15 

John Adams, Sumner (each) .... 14 

Cooper, Greeley, Sheridan, Sherman (each) . 12 

Everett 11 

John Brown, Channing, Farragut (each) . . 10 

Garrison, Hamilton, Prescott, Seward, Taylor (each) 9 

Tlioreau 7 

Bancroft 6 

Allston 5 

Edwards, Motley (each) 5 

This list certainly offers to the reader some 
surprises in its details, but it must impress 
every one, after serious study, as giving a 
demonstration of real intelligence and catho- 
licity of taste in the nation whose literature it 
represents. When, for instance, we consider 
the vast number of log cabins or small farm- 
houses where the name of Lincoln is a household 
word, while that of Emerson is as unknown as 



156 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

that of ^schylus or Catullus, one cannot help 
wondering that there should have been as many 
books written — so far as this catalogue indi- 
cates — about the recluse scholar as about the 
martyr-president. The prominence of Wash- 
ington and Franklin was to be expected, but that 
Longfellow should come so near Webster, and 
that both he and Hawthorne should distinctly 
precede Jefferson and Grant, affords surely 
some sensations of surprise. Again, there is 
something curious in the fact that Poe should 
stand "bracketed," as they say of examination 
papers, with the Margaret Fuller whom he de- 
tested; that the classic Everett should fall so 
far below the radical Parker; and that Dr. 
Channing and John Brown, the antipodes of 
each other as to temperament, should rank 
together on the returns. But all must agree 
that these figures reflect, to a greater degree 
than one would have expected, the actual prom- 
inence of these various personages in the public 
mind; and could the table include a number 
of printed catalogues instead of one, it really 
would afford as fair an approximation as we 
are likely to obtain to a National gallery of 
eminent persons. 



WESTMINSTER OF A BOOK CATALOGUE 157 

It is easily to be seen that no similar gallery 
of living persons would have much value. It 
is not, ordinarily, until after a man's death that 
serious criticism or biography begins. Com- 
paring a few living names, we find that there 
are already, in the Cleveland catalogue, sub- 
sidiary references to certain living persons, as 
follows : — 



Holmes, Whittier . 

Mrs. Stowe 

Whitman . 

Ex-President Cleveland 

Harte 

Blaine, Howells, James 

Hale, Parkman 



12 



These figures, so far as they go, exhibit the 
same combination of public and literary service 
with those previously given. Like those, they 
effectually dispose of the foolish tradition that 
republican government tends to a dull medioc- 
rity. Here we see a people honoring by silent 
suffrages their National leaders, and recording 
the votes in the catalogue of every town library. 
There is no narrow rivalry between literature 
and statesmanshij), or between either of these 



158 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

and military qualities, but all leaders are recog- 
nized for Avhat they have given. The result is 
a tribute to that natural inequality of men 
which is as fully recognized, in a true republic, 
as their natural equality ; that is, they are equal 
in the sense of being equally men, but not 
equal in their gifts as men. It is curious to 
see how the social falsities of English society 
tell on educated Englishmen, so surely as they 
grow old enough to shed the generous impulses 
of youth. It was in vain that Tennyson wrote 
"Clara Vere de Vere,'' and Froude "The 
Nemesis of Faith,"' and Ruskin "Modern 
Painters," and Swinburne the "Song in Time 
of Order: " let them once reach middle life and 
they are all stanch Tories and "accept dukes; " 
and now Huxley follows in their train. But 
here in America we find no difficulty in select- 
ing our natural leaders, sooner or later, and 
owning them; they do not have to fight for 
recognition, in most cases; it comes by a pro- 
cess like the law of gravitation. 

In our colonial town records the object of the 
meeting was often stated as being "to know the 
Town's Mind " on certain questions ; the Town's 



WESTMINSTER OF A BOOK CATALOGUE 159 

Mind being always written with capitals and 
"mentioned with reverence, as if it were a dis- 
tinguished person, hard to move." The result 
of this unconscious selection in the book cata- 
logues is to give us the Nation's Mind in 
regard to our foremost men. As time goes 
on, the decision varies; some reputations hold 
out better, some less well ; the relative position 
of Dr. Channing, for instance, has changed 
a good deal within fifty years, and so has that 
of Henry Clay; but in the end the scale settles 
itself and remains tolerably permanent. And 
there is this advantage in a hierarchy of intel- 
lect and public service thus established, that it 
does not awaken the antagonism which follows 
an hereditary aristocracy; and that if the sons 
of these eminent persons do not distinguish 
themselves, they are simply ignored and passed 
by, whereas under a hereditary aristocracy their 
high position may be a curse to the community. 
This Westminster Abbey of the newspapers 
excites no such feelings as Heine confesses 
himself to have experienced among the graves 
of the crowned heads at Westminster Abbey in 
London. He tells us that he did not grudge 



160 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW BOOK 

the eighteen pence he had paid to see them; 
but told the verger that he was delighted with 
his exhibition, and would willingly have paid 
as much more to see the collection complete. 



TOWN AND GOWN 161 

XIX 

TOWN AND GOWN 

TOURING the two years when the writer was 
a member of a State legislature, he was 
often asked if he did not encounter a certain 
widely spread prejudice against college-bred 
men. Truth compelled him to reply that he 
did, but that it almost always proceeded from 
other college-bred men. Having^ all his life 
been in the habit of attending caucuses and 
political meetings, and having very often pre- 
sided over them, he has had some opportunity 
of testing the alleged prejudice of the unedu- 
cated against the more educated, in a demo- 
cratic community, and he can truly say that he 
never happened to encounter it; but he has 
very often encountered the attempt to create it 
among those who should have known better. 
In the close contests of politics there is often a 
temptation to find a weapon against an oppo- 
nent in the charge of being college-bred or 
having written a book; but the persons who 



162 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

yield to this temptation are mostly those who 
have themselves suffered from a similar im- 
peachment, and fancy that they can score a 
point by turning States' evidence on their own 
training. But I have never seen that the effort 
had more than a very temporary influence in 
the community at large ; and this for obvious 
reasons. 

To begin with, there is very little of this 
prejudice among the poorer classes in any 
American community, for these classes are, 
whether Protestants or Catholics, not yet very 
remote from the time when they reverenced 
their clergy, and when this body represented 
leadership in all the walks of life. Among the 
Puritans, as is well known, the colleges existed 
to train clergymen, and the clergy existed to 
fill all the posts of leadership. There was no 
separate legal profession, for instance; and 
Chief Justice Sewall — whose racy journals 
make him the more sombre Pepys of the New 
England Colonial period — was educated for 
the ministry and took a seat on the bench by 
way of collateral pursuit, precisely as he ac- 
cepted the command of the Ancient and Honor- 



TOWN AND GOWN 163 

able Artillery Company and paraded with it on 
the Boston Common. Professor Goodale, the 
Harvard botanist, has lately shown that the 
beginnings of natural science in the curriculum 
of that institution were due to the fact, that 
being organized for the rearing of Christian 
ministers it must give them some knowledge of 
anatomy and the 3Iateria Medica., in order that 
they might prescribe for their sick parishioners. 
Even business matters were to some extent 
within their grasp, and this lasted into this cen- 
tury. An eminent lawyer, distinguished for his 
skill in the charge of great trust properties, hav- 
ing lately died in Boston, I was calling atten- 
tion to the fact that when I knew him, in college, 
he never gave the slightest sign of peculiar 
business aptitude ; but I was at once told 
by one who had known his father, a country 
clergyman, that this good pastor was the busi- 
ness adviser of his whole parish, and did for 
rural traders what his son afterward did for 
great capitalists. Thus much for the Protest- 
ant side; and among our Catholic citizens it 
is so the custom to see the clergy intrusted 
with great financial responsibilities, that no 



164 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

sneer against educated men ever comes from 
them ; they err on the other side, in too great 
willingness to intrust their savings to their 
spiritual advisers. 

The supposed prejudice against the inca- 
pacity of men of scholarly pursuits does not, 
therefore, come from the poorer class, whether 
Catholic or Protestant, nor does it come from 
the great intermediate and powerful class of 
the Silas Laphams; on the contrary, the 
college-bred man is more often touched by a 
certain covert and needless humility on the 
part of this class. The organizers of labor, the 
heads of great enterprises, are often mute and 
timid before those very much their inferiors in 
real training, simply from their consciousness 
that they are weak in things which are really 
of secondary importance. Just as an English- 
man who has once discovered that he misplaces 
his H's will sometimes hold his tongue when 
he has things to say more important than all the 
separate letters of the alphabet put together; 
so is it often with the uneducated American 
who seems to exult in all the glory of material 
success. In the Massachusetts Legislature I 



TOWN AND GOWN 165 

have had men come and beg me to make their 
speeches for them in regard to a certain 
measure, they putting all the facts and material 
into my hands, although they knew ten times 
as much about it as I, and could, consequently, 
make a far more effective speech ; and this 
simply because they knew that their verbs did 
not always agree with their nominative cases, 
and they attached an exaggerated importance 
to this minor matter. Whatever may be the 
defects of the much-discussed American tem- 
perament, obtuseness is certainly not one of 
them. The unschooled American recognizes and 
laments his ignorance, and, indeed, commonly 
exaggerates it; that is, he does not reflect that 
he perhaps knows things which are vastly more 
important than the things which he does not 
know, and which his college-bred neighbor 
knows. That is why he sends his son to 
college. A friend of mine, a merchant by 
training and a most acute observer, had a 
theory that the college graduates did not care 
so very much to send their sons where they had 
been, as knowing that it had not done very 
much for themselves; but that the non-srad- 



166 THE NEW WORLD AVD THE NEW BOOK 

nates were veiy anxious to send theirs, because 
thfiT attributed their own shortcomings to the 
want of that early advantage. Thus, he 
reasoned, every alternate generation goes to 
the universitT. 

In the same way. I think that the college- 
bred man, or at any rate the man of literary 
pursuits, is apt to be more humble for himself 
than he is wished by others to be. It is like 
that curious self-humiliation, at the beginning 
of our Civil War. of those who had not been 
trained in the militia, in presence of those who 
had received such training. A book of tac- 
tics looked, when one opened it, harder than 
Euclid's Geometry; and it took a little time 
to discover that it was. for a man with toler- 
ably clear head, as simple as the spelling-book. 
So the student is apt to think that the elemen- 
tary principles of business, or the rules of par- 
liamentary law. are things requiring long and 
difficult traininor: whereas thev do not, in 
acquiring, prove very hard. Then it must be 
remembered that, in this country at least, the 
scholar has very commonly made his own way 
in the world and has had to develop the prac- 



TOWN AND GOWN 167 

tical faculty, in a small way, from the very 
beginning. Nothing is more interesting, in a 
university town, than to see the variety of ante- 
cedents, usually involving some knowledge of 
men, with which the older students have come 
together. In a nation where small mechanics 
and country shopkeepers become millionnaires 
and presidents, it is not strange that the student 
whose early life was perhaps not very differ- 
ent from theirs should also have his practical 
side. 

It must be remembered that the supposed 
prejudice against educated men in practical 
affairs is not confined to our own country', but 
exists in England, in France, in Germany; and 
in each case with the additional condition 
which I have pointed out, that it is found more 
among other educated men than in the general 
public mind. We think of England as a place 
where they put authors forward in public life; 
and we instance Beaconsfield, Gladstone, 
Morley, and Bryce, by way of illustration. 
But the acute Sir Frederick Elliot wrote to the 
poet Sir Henry Taylor, in 1876 : " I think that 
literati, when they have not been exercised in 



168 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

practical affairs (note that exception !) are the 
worst of politicians." He has especially in 
mind historians, and makes the point, which is 
worth noticing, that they are a little apt to 
confound the dead and the living. "Look at 
Freeman; he digs into forgotten records and 
finds that the ancestors of some people oppressed 
the ancestors of another, four hundred years 
ago ; upon which he forthwith exhorts their 
descendants, living in peace and amity, to hate 
each other now. Another is more moderate: 
he only unearths the misgovernment of a hun- 
dred years ago as a present motive for mutual 
detestation." In this country, I should say, 
this last tendency prevails most with those who 
are not historians, but politicians. A more 
substantial drawback is the absorbing preoccu- 
pation of both the literary and the practical 
life ; and the fact that there are only twenty- 
four hours in every day. Hamerton speaks of 
a Greek philosopher, who was suspected by the 
business men of incapacity for affairs, but who 
devoted a year to proving the contrary and 
traded with such skill that he went back to his 
studies a capitalist. The practical man is 



TOWN AND GOWN 169 

often benefited by being forced into study, and 
the student by taking, when it comes to him, 
his share in practical affairs; but no one sup- 
poses that their work, in the long run, can 
advantageously change hands. 



170 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 



XX 

"MAKE THY OPTION WHICH OF 
TWO" 

TTTHO does not look back with some slight 
envy to the period when Professor 
Popkin could dwell with longing on that 
coming day when he could retire from his 
Harvard Professorship of Greek and " read the 
authors " ? He actually resigned in 1833, and 
had for nearly twenty years the felicity for 
which he longed. What he meant by reading 
the authors was well enough exhibited in that 
contemporary English clergyman, described iii 
Hogg's " Life of Shelley," who devoted all his 
waking hours for thirty years to a regular course 
of Greek writers. He arranged them in a three 
years' course, and when they were ended he 
began again. The only exception was in case 
of Homer, whose works he read every year for 
a month at the seashore — " the proper place to 
read Homer," he said ; and, as he also pointed 
out, there were twenty-four week-days in a 



" MAKE THY OPTION WHICH OF TWO "' 171 

month, and by taking a book of the " Iliad " 
before dinner, and a book of the " Odyssey " 
after dinner, he just finished his pleasant task. 
On rainy days, when he could not walk, he 
threw in the Homeric hymns ; he moreover 
read a newspaper once a week, and occasionally 
ran through a few pages of Virgil and Cicero, 
just to satisfy himself that it was a waste of 
time for any one who could read Greek to look 
at anything else. Simple and perennial feli- 
city ! no vacillation, no variableness or shadow 
of turning; no doubting between literature or 
science, still less between this or that depart- 
ment of literature. Since all advisers bid us 
read only the best books, why not follow their 
counsel, and keep to ^schylus and Homer ? 

Who could have foreseen, in Dr. Popkin's day, 
the vast expansion of modern literatures, which, 
after exhausting all the Latin races, keeps open- 
ing upon us new treasure-houses elsewhere ; so 
that Mr. Howells would bid us all learn Russian 
and Mr. Boyesen the Scandinavian tongues. 
Who could have foreseen the relentless Max 
Miiller, marshalling before us by dozens the 
Oriental religions ; and Mr. Fitzgerald concen- 



172 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

trating the wonders of them all into " Omar 
Khayyam," who offers no religion whatever, 
and makes denial more eloquent than faith ? 
Who had then dreamed of the Shakespearian 
literature, the Dantean literature, the Goethean 
literature ; even the literature of Petrarch, as 
catalogued by Prof. Willard Fiske, to the 
extent of nearly a thousand entries ? Who had 
looked forward to vast American historical 
works like Hubert Bancroft's fifty ample vol- 
umes on the Pacific Coast, or Winsor's " Narra- 
tive and Critical History of America "' ? Who 
had imagined the vast spread of magazine 
literature and of newspaper literature, threaten- 
ing, as Mr. Holt the publisher predicts, to 
swamp all study of books beneath a vast deluge 
of serials and periodicals, to be traversed here- 
after only Avith the aid of literary rafts, charts, 
and compasses ? And then, when all this is 
enumerated, there is science, claiming itself to 
monopolize the intellectual world and sometimes 
intimating doubts whether the function of 
literature itself be not at an end. 

In the very college where the peaceful Popkin 
once taught, there are now twenty-one distinct 



"MAKE THY OPTION WHICH OF TWO " 173 

elective courses in Greek alone ; and in all 
undergraduate branches not less than two hun- 
dred and thirty — each course offering occupa- 
tion enough for a whole term's study, and some 
of them for that of a whole life. The " option 
Avhich of two " described by Emerson as the 
painful necessity of later years, is here initiated 
in the earliest ; and it is even proposed to carry 
it yet further into the preparatory schools by the 
alternative standards of admission. Even in 
Greek a single mood or tense of the verb is held 
to furnish material for a treatise ; and so of 
every division and sub-division of all knowledge. 
Baron Osten Sacken. the entomologist, who 
during his stay in this country was our highest 
authority on the Biptera, or two-winged insects, 
always maintained that he had erred in marking 
out a range of study too vast for any single 
intellect ; and that he should have done better 
to confine himself to some one family, as for 
instance, the Culicidce, or gnats. There was 
nothing extreme in this confession ; it might be 
paralleled in every department of study. But 
meanwhile what becomes of " the authors " ? 
I am not now speaking with any special 



174 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

reference to the Greeks. The fate of the 
ancient classics among us was long since settled. 
When the successor of Dr. Popkin was made 
President of Harvard College, in 1860, he 
virtually surrendered his traditions by translat- 
ing the Greek quotations in his Inaugural 
Address ; and what President f'elton did for the 
elder language. President Eliot did for the 
Latin when he, at the 250th anniversary of 
that institution, bestowed the honorary degrees 
in most sonorous English. Grant that the 
" authors " now share with all other writers, in 
all languages and departments, the limitations of 
the life of man, it is plain that those limitations 
bring the greatest change to those two languages 
which were once thought to hold all knowledge 
in their grasp. But the same stern restriction 
makes itself felt in all directions ; the age has 
outgrown its few simple and convenient play- 
things, and must choose amid a myriad of 
edgetools. 

There will never be another universal scholar. 
The time when Aristotle or Plutarch went the 
rounds of the universe, and tried to label each 
phenomenon, looks now like the childhood of 



" MAKE THY OPTION WHICH OF TWO " 175 

the world, no matter how precocious the chil- 
dren. The period when Bacon sought to imi- 
tate them is scarcely nearer ; and when that 
great intellect found itself so overweighted with 
the visible facts, it seems unkind for Mr. 
Donnelly to burden him retrospectively with 
even one cipher more. The omnivorous stu- 
dent, who would gladly keep the touch of all 
branches of knowledge, finds them steadily 
slipping away from him, and may be glad if he 
can watch with fidelity the newest developments 
in some single minute field, such as fossil cock- 
roaches or the genitive case. It is useless for 
Mr. Cabot to tell us that Emerson was not a 
great scholar ; we knew it already. He could 
not in this age have been a great scholar and a 
great writer. Thoreau resolutely limited him- 
self to the observation of external nature in one 
small township in Massachusetts ; and he 
assigned himself a task so far beyond his grasp 
that we find him in his diaries puzzling over the 
common brown cocoon of the Attacus moth as 
if it was some wholly new phenomenon ; indeed, 
he seems scarcely to have noticed the insect 
world at all. The best-trained observation, in 



176 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

presence of the vast advance of knowledge, is 
very limited ; and the human memory, instead 
of being, as people think, an india-rubber bag 
of indefinite expansion, is much more like those 
pop-guns made by boys, which are loaded with 
a bit of potato at one end, and another bit at 
the other, but never by any chance hold more 
than two bits of potato at the same time. 

The acquisition of knowledge is, after all, a 
process of selection rather than of collection. 
We forget as fast as we learn, and it is doubtful 
if the most learned man really knows more at 
fifty than at twenty ; he has merely driven out 
a multitude of insignificant details by those of 
greater value. The travelling salssman and the 
horse-car conductor are probably possessed of as 
many items of detached knowledge as Von 
Humboldt or Darwin ; the difference is in their 
qualit}^ and their use. It was one of Margaret 
Fuller's acutest sayings that a man who expects 
to accomplish much in the world must learn 
after five and twenty to read with his fingers. 
Dr. Johnson, who said to the man who thanked 
God for his ignorance, " Then, sir, you have a 
great deal to be thankful for," was in a similar 



"MAKE THY OPTION WHICH OF TWO " 177 

position to the person at whom he sneered, but 
was less frank in his ascriptions of gratitude. 
The elder Agassiz once said to me that so vast 
was becoming the multiplicity of publications 
in every branch of science, the time was 
approaching when no man would be able to 
write on any subject with the slightest sense of 
security. The hope is that by new intellectual 
facilities in the way of labor-saving methods, 
the human mind may become enabled to keep 
pace in some degree with this multiplying mass 
of studious materials, just as it keeps pace with 
vaster and vaster executive enterprises. It is 
pleasant to think, also, that the wider the range 
of fascinating knowledge, the stronger becomes 
the argument for continued personal identity. 
Next to the yearnings of human affection, the 
most irresistible suopo'estion of immortality 
comes from looking up at the unattainable 
myster}- of the stars. 



178 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW BOOK 



XXI 

THE DECLINE OF THE SENTI- 
MENTAL 

A T a private charitable reading, held lately 
ill Boston, it was noticed that the younger 
part of the audience responded but slightly in 
the way of sympathy to Dr. Holmes's poem on 
the Moore Festival, while to the older guests 
the allusions seemed all very familiar and even 
touching. The waning of sympathy for Moore 
and his " Irish Melodies " simply shows the 
diminished hold of the sentimental upon us, 
taking that word to represent a certain rather 
melodramatic self -consciousness, a tender intro- 
spection in the region of the heart, a kind of 
studious cosseting of one's finer feelings. Per- 
haps it is not generally recognized how much 
more abundant was this sort of thing forty years 
ago than now, and how it moulded the very 
temperaments of those who were born into it, 
and grew up under it. Byron had as much to 
do with creating it as any one in England ; but 



THE DECLINE OF THE SENTIMENTAL 179 

more probably it goes back to Rousseau in 
France ; hardly, I should think to Petrarch, to 
whom Lowell is disposed to attribute it, and 
who certainly exerted very little influence in the 
way of sentimentality on his friend Chaucer. 
But the Byronic atmosphere certainly spread to 
Germany, as may be seen by the place conceded 
to that poet in Goethe's " Faust ; " although 
Goethe's " Werther," and Schiller's "Die 
Rauber " showed that the tendency itself was 
at one time indigenous everywhere. In England, 
Bulwer and the younger Disraeli aimed to be 
prose Byrons ; and in Moore and Mrs. Hemans, 
followed by Mrs. Norton and "L. E. L.," we see 
the sentimental spirit in successive degrees of 
dilution. 

All the vocal music of forty or fifty years ago 
— when the great German composers were but 
just beginning to make their power felt in this 
country — was of an intensely sentimental de- 
scription ; delightfully so, I might add, for those 
who were brought up to that kind of enjoy- 
ment. Moore's songs, such as " Believe Me if 
all those Endearing Young Charms," " Fly, fly 
from the World, O Bessv, with Me," "The 



180 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

Harp that once through Tara's Halls," and a 
score of others, set the popular hey-note; and 
even his hymns, such as " Come, Ye Disconso- 
late," had a similar flavor. The whole vocal 
literature of the day held the same pitch. Such 
songs as " Go Thou and dream," " Take hence 
the Bowl," ''My Soul is Dark," "The Evening 
Gun," " Those Fairy Bells," were sung in every 
drawing-room, by a class of private singers more 
impassioned and more ardently dramatic than 
one now hears anywhere, and whose singing 
afforded a training in the emotional such as no 
experience of to-day can give. Their strength 
would now be considered a weakness ; the ex- 
quisite German songs that now prevail, while 
far higher in musical quality, offer human feel- 
ing itself in a purer, simpler, and doubtless 
nobler form ; but the die-away period had its 
own fascination — the period when even the 
military bands marched to tlie plaintive strains 
of Mrs. Norton's " Love Not." 

In prose literature, as has been said, Bui war 
and Disraeli best represented that epoch. The 
two fashionable novels, /)rt7' excellence, of a 
whole generation, were " Pelham " and " Vivian 



THE DECLINE OF THE SENTIMENTAL 181 

Grey." In the latter, all the heights of foppery 
and ■persiflage did but set off Avhat was then 
regarded as the unsurpassable pathos of "Violet 
Fane's " death ; and though the consummate 
dandyism of the companion book had no such 
relief, yet Bulwer amply made up for it by the 
rivers of tears that were shed over his " Pil- 
grims of the Rhine." Not a young lover of the 
period who had acquired a decent sentimental 
education, but was sure to put a flower between 
the leaves of that work where the author says : 
" Is there one of us who has not known a being 
for whom it would seem none too wild a fan- 
tasy, to indulge such a dream ? " Yes, yes, 
Bulwer ! interpreter of one's visions, everybody 
had known such an object of emotion ; and a 
thousand plain Susans and Sarahs stood forever 
enshrined in that romantic creation — " the 
beautiful ideal of the world" — when death, or 
a luckier lover, or parental obduracy, or the 
mere accident of a family removal from New 
York to Cincinnati, had banished them from the 
regions of every day. Far be it from me to 
speak with disrespect of these emotions; it will 
presently be shown that they had many advan- 



182 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

tages ; but in their full and unquestioned vigor 
they certainly belonged to the period when men 
wore cravats swathed half a dozen times round 
the neck, and when, as the author of " Pelham " 
wrote, there was safet}' in a swallow-tail. 

It is not in the English tongue alone that 
this emotional tendency was exj^ressed, for 
Lamartine was then much read, and even his 
travels in the East were saturated with it ; and 
so were the writings of Jean Paul, who then 
rivalled Goethe in the affections of the newly 
enrolled students of German. His " Siebenkas " 
which avowedly records the "life, death, and 
wedding" of a hero who deliberately counter- 
feits death, that he and his mismated wife may 
each espouse the object of a loftier tenderness, 
was the climax of the sentimental ; and yet this 
preposterous situation was so seriously and 
sympathetically painted, that probably no one 
who read the book at that day can now revert 
to it without emotion. But it is necessary to 
bear all this in mind in order to understand how 
all this atmosphere of exaggerated feeling 
seemed blown away in an instant by the first 
appearance of Sam Weller on the scene. 



I 



THE DECLINE OF THE SENTIMENTAL 183 

Dickens himself bore marked traces of the very 
epidemic he banished, and his Little Nells and 
Little Pauls were the last survival of the senti- 
mental period ; but nevertheless, it was he, more 
than any one else, who exorcised it ; and what- 
ever its merits, he rendered the world a service 
in that act of grace. 

Yet no one can really regret, I should say, to 
have been born during that earlier period ; it 
suffused life with a certain charm ; and though 
it may sometimes have prematurely exhausted 
the heart, it oftener kept it young. For as we 
grow older we revert to the associations of 
our youth ; what prevailed then seems always 
desirable ; if our youth was a period of com- 
pression, our age is doubly such, but if that 
early period had emotional freedom and 
epayiehement,, our old age will have the same. 
Those who were in the current of the trans- 
cendental movement that swept through 
Europe and America half a century ago, will 
probably always have a touch of sentimentalism 
in their sympatliies, a little exuberance some- 
where, even when the outside is hard or con- 
strained ; and even those who belong to a later 



184 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW BOOK 

school may show traces of that which j^i'cvailed 
when they were in their cradles, as Howells's 
volume of poems opens with the sentimental 
and even beautiful strains of " Forlorn." This, 
then, was the path through which he came to 
Silas Lapham and Lemuel Barker : and very 
likely, when Mr. Henry James's biography 
comes to be written, he may yet be found to 
have begun by taking tremulous footsteps in 
some sucli romantic path. After all, sentimen- 
talism is a thing immortal, for it represents the 
slight overplus and excess of youthful emotion ; 
it bears the same relation to the deeper feelings 
of later life that the college contests of the foot- 
ball ground bear to life's conflicts. Tennyson, 
who began b}^ representing it, and then, with a 
hand far finer than that of Dickens, helped to 
guide us out of it, has unconsciously described 
the service done to the age by the epoch of 
sentimentalism when he paints in his " Gar- 
dener's Daughter,"' the mission fulfilled by 
Juliet, the earliest object of his flame : — 

'•' The summer pilot of an empty heart 
Unto the shores of nothing. Know you not 
Such touches are but embassies of love 
To tamper with the feelings, ere he found 
Empire for life ?" 



CONCERNING GIANTS 185 

xxir 

CONCERNING GIANTS 

"^TOTHING shows the way in which fame 
concentrates itself on certain leading 
figures more effectually than an inspection of 
book catalogues. For instance, the British 
Museum catalogue gives fifty-eight folio pages 
— with double columns and small type — to its 
Dante entries. The forthcoming catalogue of 
the Dante collection in the Harvard Colleo-e 
Library will include about eleven hundred 
titles ; this being just about the size of the 
great collection of " Petrarch Books " lately 
catalogued by its owner, Prof. Willard 
Fiske, formerly of Cornell University. The 
whole body of Dantean literature, it is esti- 
mated by experts, must extend to between 
two and three thousand titles ; and the Napo- 
leonic literature has been estimated, or rather 
guessed, at five thousand. The Barton 
Shakespearean collection in the Boston Public 
Library includes about a thousand titles under 



186 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

the " works " of ShakesjDeare, and fifteen hun- 
dred more under " Shakespeareana." It is cer- 
tain that all these special collections are very 
incomplete, and it is altogether probable that all 
these estimates are too scanty. If they are not, 
they soon will be, since all these special litera- 
tures are increasing all the time. More than a 
hundred titles have been added to the Dante 
list, for instance, during the past year ; and 
the Petrarch quinquecentennial called forth 
one hundred and twenty-five new works about 
that poet in Italy alone. If anything is cer- 
tain, it is that, when the world has once defi- 
nitely accepted a man as among the elect, his 
fame and liis lead over his contemporaries go 
on increasing with the passing years. It is 
possible that the Academie Frangaise may yet 
be chiefly remembered because it rejected 
Moliere, as the mighty Persian conqueror had a 
place in fame simply as one who knew not the 
worth of Firdousi. 

" Literature," it has been said, is " attar of 
roses : one distilled drop from a million petals." 
Those who learned their Italian nearl}^ half a 
century ago will remember that the favorite 



CONCERNING GIANTS 187 

text-book was named, " The Four Poets " (/ 
Quattro Poeti). But Ariosto and Tasso are 
now practically dropped out of the running; 
and those who still read Petrarch are expected 
to treat rather deferentially those for whom 
Italian literature means Dante only. Yet 
Voltaire wrote of Dante, only a century and a 
half ago, that although occasionally, under 
favorable circumstances, he wrote lines not un- 
worthy of Tasso or Ariosto, yet his work was, as 
a whole, "stupidly extravagant and barbarous." 
" The Italians," he says, " call him divine, but 
it is a hidden divinity ; few people understand 
his oracles. He has commentators, which is 
perhaps another reason for his not being under- 
stood. His reputation will go on increasing, 
because scarce anybody reads him." How little 
he was known in England a hundred years ago 
may be seen from the fact that Dr. Nathan 
Drake, who had quite a name as a critic a cen- 
tury ago, spoke of Dr. Darwin's placid and 
pedantic poem, '• The Botanic Garden," as 
showing " the wild and terrible sublimity of 
Dante." A hundred years from this have ended 
in Ruskin"s characterization of Dante as " the 



188 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

central man of all the world, as representing in 
perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and 
intellectual faculties, all at their highest." 
When we consider that this was said of a man 
born more than six centuries before the words 
were written, it certainly illustrates the con- 
centration of fame upon a single name. With 
scarcely less superb exclusiveness, Goethe 
described Napoleon as '• a compendium of the 
world" (^Dieses Compendium der Welt^. 

In allusion to such instances as these, Goethe 
expressed to Eckermann the conviction that the 
higher powers had pleased themselves by pla- 
cing among men certain detached figures, so 
alluring as to set everybody striving after 
them, yet so great as to be beyond all reach 
(^Die so anlochend sind, das jeder naeh ilmen 
strebt, und so gross das niemand sie erreicht}. 
"Mozart," he said. " re2:)resents the unattain- 
able in music, and Shakespeare in jDoetry." 
He instanced also Raphael and Napoleon ; and 
the loyal Eckermann inwardly added the 
speaker himself to the list. " I refer " Goethe 
said " to the natural dowry, the inborn wealth " 
(^Das Naturell, das grosse Aiigeborene der 



CONCERNING GIANTS 189 

Natur'). It will be a theme for never-endino- 
discussion how far this concentration is really 
due to the exceptional greatness of the subject, 
and how far to the tendency of genius to draw 
to itself all the floating materials of the time, 
to drain its best intellects, to reflect its best 
impulses. Dante, of all great writers, is the 
least explainable in this way ; but in the case 
of Shakespeare, of Voltaire, of Goethe, it is 
obvious enough. The last named was always 
ready to admit his own obligations, not merely 
to his own fellow-countrymen, as Schiller, but 
to Englishmen and Frenchmen ; and was pro- 
foundly moved on receiving the first French 
version of his '^ Faust," from the thought of the 
profound influence exercised by Voltaire and his 
great contemporaries over him as over the whole 
civilized world. Humbler men are constantly 
obliged to recognize how they themselves have 
been fed and nourished by those lowlier still ; 
and we may be very sure that the greatest are 
formed in the same way, and draw from many 
obscure and even inexplicable sources, as Heine 
claims that he learned all the history of the 
French Revolution through the druramino- of 
an old French drummer. 



190 THE NEW WORLD AKD THE NEW ROOK 

It is obvious enough that the relative propor- 
tions of printed matter do not precisely reflect 
absolute merit, because they are liable to be 
influenced by trivial considerations, apart from 
personal qualities. The Man in the Iron Mask 
was not necessarily a great man because he 
occasioned an extensive literature ; and Junius 
fills the library as an inexhaustible conundrum, 
whereas plain Sir Philip Francis might never 
have elicited even a biography. Had Shelley 
been the contented husband of one wife, or had 
Poe selected any one city to dwell in and dwelt 
there, it is certain that the Shelley literature 
and the Poe literature would have been far 
slenderer in dimensions, though the genius of 
the poets might have remained the same. It is 
the personal qualities, in such cases, that multi- 
ply the publications, though it is quite true, on 
the other side, that Poe might have lived un- 
noticed in more cities than claimed Homer had 
it not been for "The Raven," and that Shelley 
might have had as many wives as a Mormon 
but for " The Skylark." As time goes on, it is 
the thought of the poet more than the gossip 
about his life which holds and creates literature, 



CONCERNING GIANTS 191 

and there are always a dozen who Avish to un- 
lock the mystery of Hamlet for one who 
demands positive evidence as to Shakespeare's 
wedded bliss. But, however we explain it, 
there is such a tendency of study and criticism 
toward concentration on single figures, that no 
nation in the course of centuries can furnish 
more than two or three; and it is much for 
any people if it can furnish one. The growing 
proportions of the Emerson literature leave 
little doubt who is to provide for America — if, 
indeed, any one is to supply it — that central 
and controlling figure. 



192 THE NEW WOKLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

XXIII 

WEAPONS OF PRECISION 

TTTHEN in July, 1609, the Iroquois Indians 
first saw a gun fired, and saw two men 
fall dead at a distance, because the Sieur de 
Champlain had raised something to his cheek, 
they were so utterly frightened that the whole 
tribe ran away, abandoning their camp and 
their provisions. Yet the gun was only a 
short weapon, then called an arquebus, and 
loaded with four balls. It did not take long 
for these very Indians to learn the use of the 
arquebus ; and yet, if one of them were to come 
to life again and look at a modern rifle, it 
would cause him as much amazement as if he 
had never seen a firearm. These delicate 
grooves and spiral curves would strike him as 
a piece of mere affectation ; and he would pre- 
fer by all means an honest old-fashioned affair 
that would send a bullet straight to its mark. 
He would not be convinced until he again saw 
a man fall dead, and this time at an incredible 
distance, by an invisible blow. 



WEAPONS OF PRECISION 193 

Now, style in writing is a weapon far more 
delicate and more formidable than the latest 
form of needle-gun. It will not merely kill 
a man's body at the range of a thousand yards, 
but his reputation at a distance of centuries. 
Nay, it will not only kill, but it will keep 
alive, which may be worse; keep the stained 
memory in existence beyond the possibility of a 
happy oblivion — and so also with memories of 
good. So long as it remains crude and unde- 
veloped, language has not acquired this capa- 
bility; but every added refinement of touch, 
every improved note of precision, will expand 
and perfect this carrying power. The blunt 
repartee of the mining-camp may furnish as 
good a prelude as any other for drawing a 
revolver from the hip pocket; but the effect of 
the saying dies with the duel and the funeral. 
It takes the fine rapier of Talleyrand's wit to 
impale an opponent for a hundred years upon a 
single delicate phrase, intervening between the 
smile and the snuff-box. 

The French language has doubtless a peculiar 
capacity in this direction, sharpened by the 
steady practice of generations ; but the English 



194 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

language comes next to it, could we only out- 
grow the impression that there is no honesty in 
anything but a knock-down blow, and that all 
finer touches are significant of sin ; that boxing 
is a manly exercise, in short, while fencing is 
not. It is a curious fact, however, that as the 
best American manners incline to the French 
and not the English model, so the tendency of 
American literary style is to the finer methods, 
quicker repartees, and more delicate turns. 
People complain, and with some justice, of a cer- 
tain thinness in the material of Mr. Howells's 
conversations; but his phrases are not so thin 
as the edge of a Damascus blade, and where the 
life itself is to be reached, this keenness has a 
certain advantage. We are constantly told by 
English critics that in real life people do not 
talk in this way, to which the answer is, that 
the scene of his novels is not laid in England. 

Lightness of touch is the final test of power. 
Oil il 7i'y a jjoint de delicatessen il 7iy a point de 
litterature. Joubert goes on to add that where 
there is shown in literary style only the attri- 
bute of strength, the style expresses character 
alone, not training. There has come lately a 



WEAPONS OP PRECISION 195 

certain slovenliness into the vocabulary of 
Englishmen which is a sign of weakness, not 
of strength. It may be meant for strength, 
but, like swearing, it is rather a substitute for 
it. When Matthew Arnold, at the outset of 
his paper on Emerson, proposes that we should 
"pull ourselves together" to examine him, he 
says crudely what might have been more forci- 
bly conveyed by a finer touch. When Mr. 
Gosse, in one of his Forum papers, answers an 
objection with "A fiddlestick's end for such a 
theory!" it does not give an impression of 
vigor, or of what he calls, in case of Dryden, 
"a virile tramp," but rather suggests that 
humbler hero of whom Byron records that — 

" He knew not what to say, and so he swore." 

The fact that Mr. Arnold and Mr. Gosse have 
both made e-ood criticisms on others does not 
necessarily indicate that they practise as they 
preach. To come back once more to the incom- 
parable Joubert, we often find a good ear per- 
fectly compatible with a false note. Que de 
gens, en litterature, out V ore ille juste, et chantent 
faux ! 



196 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

It is never worth while to dwell nmch 1123011 
international comparisons; it is enough to say 
that the oft-criticised want of the art-instinct in 
English-speaking nations shows itself, though 
in a less degree, in literature also, and renders 
constant watchfulness needful lest we revert 
into brutality. In this resjiect modern Ger- 
many can teach us little, save through the 
Franco-German Heine. A young American 
usually comes home from a German university 
with more knowledge than when he went 
there, but with less power of felicitous expres- 
sion. But Greece and Rome have still unex- 
hausted lessons, and so have Persia and Arabia ; 
these last, indeed, wreathe their weapons with 
too many roses, but they carry true neverthe- 
less. Dante not only created his own concejj- 
tions, but almost the very language in which 
he wrote ; and what was his power of expres- 
sion we can judge best by seeing in hoAv few 
lines he can put vividly before us some theme 
which Tennyson or Browning afterward ham- 
mers out into a long poem. In English litera- 
ture there seemed to be developing, in the time 
of Addison, something of that steadv, even, 



WEAPONS OF PRECISION 197 

felicitous power which makes French prose so 
remarkable ; but it has passed, since his day, 
possibly from excess of vigor, into a prolonged 
series of experiments. Johnson experimental- 
ized in one direction, Coleridge in another; 
Landor, Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, in other 
directions still ; and the net result is an uncer- 
tain type of style, which has almost always 
vigor and sometimes beauty, but is liable at 
any moment to relapse into Rider Haggard and 
"a fiddlestick's end." It is hard for our 
modest American speech to hold its own, now 
that the potent influence of Emerson has passed 
away ; but we are lost unless we keep resolutely 
in mind that prose style ought not to be merely 
a bludgeon or a boomerang, but should be a 
weapon of precision. 



198 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

XXIV 
THE TEST OF THE DIME NOVEL 

""VrO work of fiction ever published in Lon- 
don, the newspapers say, received so many 
advance orders as greeted a late story by Mr. 
Haggard. It is a curious illustration of the 
difference between the current literary tenden- 
cies of England and America, that in the 
mother-country alone are authors of this type 
taken seriously. The sale of their works is 
often larger here than in England, for the same 
reason which makes the combined circulation 
of daily newspapers so much larger; but they 
are no more considered as forming a part of 
literature than one would include in a "His- 
tory of the Drama " some sworn statement as 
to the number of tickets sold for a Christmas 
pantomime. When a certain Mr. Mansfield 
Tracy Walworth was murdered near New York, 
a few years ago, it came out incidentally that 
he had written a novel called "Warwick," of 
which seventy-five thousand copies had been 



THE TEST OF THE DIME NOVEL 199 

sold, and another called "Delaplaine," that 
had gone up to forty-five thousand. Another 
author of the same school, known as "Ned 
Buntline," is said to have earned sixty thou- 
sand dollars in a single year by his efforts; 
and still another, Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., is known 
to have habitually received a salary of ten 
thousand dollars for publications equally pop- 
ular. No community can do without such 
books, but in America they are not usually 
counted as literature. Their authors scarcely 
obtain even the cheap immortality of the ency- 
clopaedia. Such books aie innocent enough ; 
they are simply liarmless weeds that grow up 
wherever the soil is rich, and sometimes where 
it is barren ; science must catalogue them im- 
partially, but they are not reckoned as a part of 
the horticultural product. The peculiarity is, 
that in England Mr. Haggard's crop of weeds 
is counted into the harvest; his preposterous 
plots are gravely discussed, compared, and 
criticised; he is himself admitted into the 
Contemporary Review as a valued contributor; 
Mr. Lang writes books with him; his success 
lies not merely in his publisher's balance, like 



200 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

that of Mr. Walworth, Mr. Cobb, or ^'Necl 
Buntline," but it is a succes d'estime. 

When, on the other hand, one opens an 
American daily paper to see what is said about 
the latest Haggard publication, one is likely to 
happen upon something like this : " We grudge 
it the few necessary lines . . . The illustra- 
tions are worthy of what they illustrate, and a 
second-rate imagination runs riot in pictures 
and text/' Even this, perhaps, is giving too 
much space to the matter; but even if a London 
critic wished to say just this, he would say it 
on such a scale as if he were discussing a post- 
humous work by George Eliot. This differ- 
ence is the more to be noticed because there 
was surely a time when the externals of good 
writing, at least, were held in high esteem at 
London ; and the critics of that metropolis 
were wont to give but short shrift to any book 
which disregarded those conditions. But that 
which practically excludes Mr. Haggard from 
the ranks of serious and accredited writers is 
not that his sentiment is melodramatic, his 
fancy vulgar, and his situations absurd; the 
more elementary ground of exclusion is that he 



THE TEST OF THE DIME NOVEL 201 

makes fritters of English. It is hard for criti- 
cism to deal seriously with a novelist who 
writes: "It is us;" "He . . . read on like 
some one reads in some ghastly dream;" 
"Jacobus . . . whom was exceedingly sick;" 
"So that was where they were being taken to; " 
and the like. In the Coyitemporary Review 
his style seems to have been revised editori- 
ally, and we find nothing worse than such 
slang phrases as "played out," though this is 
certainly bad enough. If a man in decent 
society should place his feet upon the table 
but once, his standing would be as effectually 
determined as if his offences had been seventy 
times seven. 

Now, whatever may be said of current 
tendencies in American literature, it may at 
least be claimed that our leading novelists do 
not tilt back their chairs or put their feet upon 
the table. Mr. Howells, for instance, has his 
defects, and may be proceeding, just now, upon 
a theory too narrow; but it is impossible to 
deny that he recognizes the minor morals of 
literary art. His sentences hold well together; 
he does not gush, does not straggle, gives no 



202 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

passages of mere twaddle. He does not, like 
William Black, catch the same salmon over 
again so many times in a single story, and with 
such ever-increasing fulness of detail, that 
Izaak Walton himself would at last be bored 
into an impulse of forbearance; he does not, 
like Clark Russell, keep his heroine for nearly 
a year running about half-clothed over scorch- 
ing rocks upon a tropical island, and then go 
into raptures over the dazzling whiteness of her 
bosom. So in the use of language, Howells 
does not, like Hardy, write "tactical observa- 
tion" where he means "tactful;" or, like 
Haggard, say "those sort of reflections." It is 
a curious thing that on the very points where 
America formerly went to school to England, 
we should now have to praise our own authors 
for setting a decent example. 

Can it be that, as time goes on, the habit of 
careful writing is one day to be set aside care- 
lessly, as a mere American whim? In Profes- 
sor Bain's essay " On Teaching English, with 
Detailed Examples " one finds such phrases 
on the part of the author as " Sixty themes or 
thereby are handled in these pages " (p. 38), 



THE TEST OF THE DIME NOVEL 203 

and "The whole of the instruction in higher 
English might be overtaken in such a course " 
(p. 48) ; the italics being my own. If such are 
the "detailed examples " given by professional 
teachers in England, what is to become of the 
followers? It is encouraging, perhaps, to see 
that the prolonged American resistance to the 
Anglicism "different to" may be having a 
little reflex influence, when the Spectator 
describes Tennyson's second " Locksley Hall " 
as being "different from" his first. The 
influence is less favorable when we find one of 
the most local and illiterate of American collo- 
quialisms reappearing in the Pall Mall G-azette, 
where it says : " Even Mr. Sala is better known, 
we expect^ for his half-dozen books," etc. But 
the most repellent things one sees in English 
books, in the way of language, are the coarse- 
nesses for which no American is responsible, 
as when in the graceful writings of Juliana 
Ewing the reader comes upon the words 
"stinking" or "nigger." This last offensive 
word is also invariably used by Froude in 
"Oceana." Granting that taste and decorum 
are less important than logic and precision, it 



204 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

seems as if even these last qualities must have 
become a little impaired when we read in the 
Saturday Revieiv such curious lapses as this: 
"At home we have only the infinitely little, 
the speeches of infinitesimal members of Parlia- 
ment. ... In America matters yet more 
minute occupy the press." More minute than 
the infinitely little and the infinitesimal ! 

It will be a matter of deep regret to all 
thoughtful Americans should there ever be a 
distinct lowering of the standard of literary 
workmanship in England. The different 
branches of the English-speaking race are 
mutually dependent; they read each other's 
books ; they need to co-operate in keeping up 
the common standard. It is too much to ask 
of any single nation that it should do this 
alone. Can it be that the real source of the 
change, if it is actually in progress, may be 
social rather than literary? It is conceivable 
that the higher status of the dime novel in 
England may be simply a part of that reversion 
toward a lower standard which grows naturally 
out of an essentially artificial social structure. 
Is it possible that some strange and abnormal 



THE TEST OP THE DIME NOVEL 205 

results should not follow where one man is 
raised to the peerage because he is a successful 
brewer, and another because he is Alfred Ten- 
nyson ? No dozen poets or statesmen, it is said, 
would have been so mourned in England as was 
Archer the jockey; nor did Holmes or Lowell 
have a London success so overpowering as that 
of "Buffalo Bill.'' In a community which 
thus selects its heroes, why should not the 
highest of all wreaths of triumph be given to 
Mr. Haggard's Umslopagaas, "that dreadful- 
looking, splendid savage " ? 



206 THE NEW WORLD "AND THE NEW BOOK 



XXV 

THE TRICK OF SELF-DEPRECIATION 

nnHE two great branches of the English- 
speaking race have this in common, that 
they criticise themselves very frankly, in a way 
one rarely finds among Germans or Frenchmen. 
It comes, perhaps, from the habit of local self- 
government. If the streets are not well lighted, 
or if one's horse stumbles over an ill-kept pave- 
ment, the natural impulse is to complain of it 
to every one we meet, and to write about it in 
the local newspaper. Instead of putting only 
our strong points forward, we are always ready 
to discuss our weakest side. This must always 
be remembered in digesting the criticisms of 
Englishmen. Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, 
have said nothing about Americans more un- 
pleasant than they had previously said about 
their own countrymen ; and why should we 
expect to fare any better? It is only in foreign 
countries that even we Americans stand up 



THE TRICK OF SELF-DEPIIECIATION 207 

resolutely for our own land. I lived for some 
time with a returned fellow-countryman of very 
keen wit, who, after long residence in Europe, 
found nothing to please him at home. One 
day, meeting one of his European companions, 

I was asked, " How is ? Does he stand up 

for everything American, through thick and 
thin, as he used to do in Florence ? " Turn- 
ing upon my neighbor with this unexpected 
supply of ammunition, I was met with the 
utmost frankness. He owned that while in 
Europe he had defended all American ways, 
through loyalty, and that he criticised them at 
home for the same reason. " I shall abuse my 
own country," he said, "so long as I think it 
is worth saving. When that hope is gone, I 
shall praise it." 

In the once famous poem of " Festus," re- 
called lately to memory by its fiftieth anniver- 
sary, there is a fine passage about the useless- 
ness of indiscriminate censure : — 

" The worst way to improve the world 
Is to condemn it. Men may overget 
Dekision, not despair." 

For example, I cannot help admiring the patient 



208 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

fidelity with which my old friend Professor 
Norton holds up everything among us to an 
ideal standard, and censures what he thinks 
the vanity of our nation. But those who 
think with me that behind that aj)parent vanity 
there is a real self-distrust, which is a greater 
evil, — those who think that timidity, not con- 
ceit, is our real national foible, — can easily see 
how these very criticisms foster that timidity ; 
so that " meek young men grow up in libraries," 
in Emerson's phrase, who feel that what the}' 
can say can claim no weight in either conti- 
nent, so long as they do not say it in the Satu7'- 
day Review. So some rather impulsive remarks 
in a New York newspaper as to the large 
number of persons in this country, as in all 
countries, who assume a clean shirt but once 
a week, probably did little or no good to the 
offending individuals, while it has winged a 
fatal arrow for Matthew Arnold's bow, as for 
many others. Comparisons are often mislead- 
ing. David Urquhart, the English traveller, 
was always denouncing his fellow-countrymen 
as exceedingly dirty when compared with the 
Mohammedan races, and used to wish that 



THE TRICK OF SELF-DEPRECIATION 209 

Charles Martel had not finally driven back the 
Saracen forces at the battle of Tours, because 
if he had been defeated, Urquhart says, the 
Mohammedans would have overrun all Europe, 
" and then even we English should have been 
gentlemen." 

Of all the points on which we Americans 
are apt to satirize ourselves, the much-discussed 
American girl is the most available. There is 
not in this wide land a journalist so callow as 
not to be able, when news runs short, to turn 
a paragraph on this theme, with some epigram 
as sparkling as his brains and as comprehen- 
sive as his experience. Thus, opening a West- 
ern magazine, one comes upon the amazing 
statement that the New York girl " dines 
heavily, drinks wine at all meals, smokes cigar- 
ettes, and revels at all times in the effects of 
the most advanced usages," — whatever this 
last vague and awful intimation may mean. 
On the next page the same author assures us, 
with equally close and unerring knowledge, 
that "the Southern girl is the most truly 
learned of her sex ; . . . she is seldom other- 
wise than beautiful ; . . . she plays all classi- 



210 THE NEW WOELD AND THE NEW BOOK 

cal music without notes." Why are we so 
severe on poor stray Englishmen, who know no 
better, when we ourselves furnish such social 
observation as this ? Yet this kind of thing 
may be read far and wide under the head of 
" Society Chit-chat," and is apt to leave the 
impression that the writer was about as near 
to the wondrous creatures he describes as that 
coachman mentioned by Horace Walpole, who, 
having driven certain maids of honor for many 
years, left his savings to his son on condition 
that this chosen heir should never marry a maid 
of honor. 

The real test of the manners and morals of a 
nation is not by comparison with other nations, 
but with itself. It must be judged by the his- 
torical, not by the topographical, standard. 
Does it develop? and how? Manners, like 
morals, are an affair of evolution, and must 
often be a native product, — a wholly indige- 
nous thing. This is the case, for instance, with 
the habitual American courtesy to women in 
travelling, — a thing unparalleled in any Euro- 
pean country, and of which, even in this coun- 
try, Ho wells finds his best type in the Cali- 



THE TRICK OF SELF-DEPEECIATiON 211 

fornian. What comes nearest to it among the 
Latin races is the courtesy of the high-bred 
gentleman toward the hidy who is his social 
equal, which is a wholly different thing. A 
similar point of evolution in this country is the 
decorum of a public assembly. It is known 
that at the early town meetings in New Eng- 
land men sat with their hats on, as in England. 
Unconsciously, by a simple evolution of good 
manners, the practice has been outgrown in 
America ; but Parliament still retains it. Many 
good results may have followed imperceptibly 
from this same habit of decorum. Thus Mr. 
Bryce points out that the forcible interruption 
of a public meeting by the opposite party, 
although very common in England, is very rare 
in America. In general, with us, usages are 
more flexible, more adaptive ; in public meet- 
ings, for instance, we get rid of a great many 
things that are unutterably tedious, as the 
English practice of moving, seconding, and 
debating the prescribed vote of thanks to the 
presiding officer at the end of the most insig- 
niticant gathering. It is very likely that even 



212 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

our incessant self-criticism contributes toward 
this gradual amelioration of habits. In that 
case the wonder is, that our English cousins, 
who criticise themselves quite as incessantly, 
should move so slowl}-. 



THE LITERARY PENDULUM 213 

XXVI 

THE LITERARY PENDULUM 

A FTER all," said the great advocate Rufus 
Choate, " a book is the only immortality." 
That was the lawyer's point of view ; but the 
author knows that, even after the book is pub- 
lished, the immortality is often still to seek. In 
the depressed moods of the advocate or the 
statesman, he is apt to imagine himself as writ- 
ing a book ; and when this is done, it is easy 
enough to carry the imagination a step farther 
and to make the work a magnificent success ; 
just as, if you choose to fancy yourself a for- 
eigner, it is as easy to be a duke as a tinker. 
But the professional author is more often like 
Christopher Sly, whose dukedom is in dreams ; 
and he is fortunate if he does not say of his 
own career with Christopher : " A very excel- 
lent piece of work, good madam lady. Would 
'twere done ! " 

In our college days we are told that men 
change, while books remain unchanged. But in 



214 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

a very few years we find that the circle of books 
alters as swiftly and strangely as that of the 
men who write or the boys who read them. 
When the late Dr. Walter Channing of Boston 
was revisiting in old age his birthplace, New- 
port, R.I., he requested me to take him to the 
Redwood Library, of which he had been libra- 
rian some sixty years before. He presently 
asked the librarian, with an eagerness at first 
inexplicable, for a certain book, whose name I 
had never before heard. With some difficulty 
the custodian hunted it up, entombed beneath 
other dingy folios in a dusty cupboard. Nobody, 
he said, had ever before asked for it during his ad- 
ministration. " Strange ! " said Dr. Channing, 
turning over the leaves. "This was in my time 
the show-book of the collection ; people came 
here purposely to see it." He closed it with a 
sigh, and it was replaced in its crypt. Dr. 
Channing is dead, the librarian who unearthed 
the book is since dead, and I have forgotten its 
very title. In all coming time, probably, its 
repose will be as undisturbed as that of Hans 
Andersen's forgotten Christmas-tree in the gar- 
ret. Did, then, the authorship of that book give 



THE LITERARY PENDULUM 215 

to its author so very substantial a hold on 
immortality ? 

But there is in literary fame such a thing as 
recurrence — a swing of the pendulum which 
at first brings despair to the young author, yet 
yields him at last his only consolation. L'eter- 
nite est une pendule, wrote Jacques Bridaine, 
that else forgotten Frenchman whose phrase 
gave Longfellow the hint of his " Old Clock 
on the Stair." When our professors informed 
us that books remained unchanged, those of us 
who were studious at once pinched ourselves to 
buy books ; but the authors for whom we made 
economies in our wardrobe are now as obsolete, 
very likely, as the garments that we exchanged 
for them. No undergraduate would now take 
off my hands at half price, probably, the sets of 
Landor's "Imaginary Conversations" and Cole- 
ridge's " Literary Remains," which it once 
seemed worth a month of threadbare elbows to 
possess. I lately called the attention of a young 
philologist to a tolerably full set of Thomas 
Taylor's translations, and found that he had 
never heard of even the name of tliat servant 
of obscure learning. In college we studied 



216 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW BOOK 

Cousin and Jouffroy, and he who remembers 
the rise and fall of all that ambitious school of 
French eclectics can hardly be sure of the per- 
manence of Herbert Spencer, the first man 
since their day who has undertaken to explain 
the whole universe of being. How we used to 
read Hazlitt, whose very name is so forgotten 
that an accomplished author has lately duplicated 
the title of his most remarkable book, " Liber 
Amoris," without knowing that it had ever been 
used ! What a charm Irving threw about the 
literary career of Roscoe ; but who now recog- 
nizes his name ? Ardent youths, eager to com- 
bine intellectual and worldly success, fed them- 
selves in those days on " Pelham " and " Vivian 
Grey ; " but these works are not now even in- 
cluded in "Courses of Reading" — that last 
infirmity of noble fames. One may look in 
vain through the vast mausoleum of Bartlett's 
" Dictionary of Quotations " for even that one 
maxim of costume, which was " Pelham's " bid 
for immortality. 

Literary fame is, then, by no means a fixed 
increment, but a series of vibrations of the pen- 
dulum. Happy is that author who comes to be 



THE LITERARY PENDULUM 217 

benefited by an actual return of reputation — 
as athletes get beyond the peiiod of breathless- 
ness, and come to their "second wind." Yet 
this is constantly haiDpening, Emerson, visit- 
ing Landor in 1847, wrote in his diary, ''He 
pestered me with Southey — but who is 
Southey?" Now, Southey had tasted fame 
more promptly than his greater contemporaries, 
and liked the taste so well that he held his 
own poems far superior to those of Words- 
worth, and wrote of them, " With Virgil, with 
Tasso, with Homer, there are fair grounds of 
comparison." Then followed a period during 
which the long shades of oblivion seemed to 
have closed over the author of '' Madoc " and 
"Kehama." Behold! in 1886 the Pall Mall 
Gazette, revising through " the best critics " 
Sir James Lubbock's " Hundred Best Books," 
dethrones Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Lamb, and 
Landor ; omits them all, and reinstates the for- 
gotten Southey once more. Is this the final 
award of fate ? No : it is simply the inevitable 
swing of the pendulum. 

Southey, it would seem, is to have two 
innings ; perhaps one day it will yet be Hayley's 



218 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK - 

turn. " Would it please 3'ou very much," asks 
Warrington of Pendennis, " to have been the 
author of Hayley's verses ? " Yet Hayley was, 
in his day, as Southey testifies, "by popular 
election the king of the English poets ; " and he 
was held so important a personage that he re- 
ceived, what probably no other author ever has 
won, a large income for the last twelve years of 
his life in return for the prospective copyright 
of his posthumous memoirs. Miss Anna Seward, 
writing in 1786, ranks him, with the equally 
forgotten Mason, as " the two foremost poets 
of the day ; " she calls Hayley 's poems " mag- 
nolias, roses, and amaranths," and pronounces 
his esteem a distinction greater than monarchs 
hold it in their power to bestow. But prob- 
ably nine out of ten who shall read these lines 
will have to consult a biographical dictionary to 
find out who Hayley was ; while his odd j^rotege^ 
William Blake, whom the fine ladies of the day 
wondered at Hayley for patronizing, is now the 
favorite of literature and art. 

So strong has been the recent swing of the 
pendulum in favor of what is called realism in 
fiction, it is very possible that if Hawthorne's 



THE LITERARY PENDULUM 219 

" Twice-told Tales " were to appear for the first 
time to-morrow they would attract no more 
attention than they did fifty years ago. Mr. 
Stockton has lately made a similar suggestion 
as to the stories of Edgar Poe-. Perhaps this 
gives half a century as the approximate meas- 
ure of the variations of fate — the periodicity 
of the pendulum. On the other hand, Jane 
Austen, who would, fifty years ago, have been 
regarded as an author suited to desolate islands 
or long and tedious illnesses, has now come to 
be the founder of a school, and must look 
down benignly from heaven to see the brightest 
minds assiduously at work upon that *•' little bit 
of ivory, two inches square " by which she symbo- 
lized her novels. Then comes in, as an altera- 
tive, the strong Russian tribe, claimed by real- 
ists as real, by idealists as ideal, and perhaps 
forcing the pendulum in a new direction. 
Nothing, surely, since Hawthorne's death, has 
given us so much of the distinctive flavor of 
his genius as Tourgueneff's extraordinary 
" Poems in Prose " in the admirable version of 
Mrs. T. S. Perry. 

But the question, after all, recurs : why 



220 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

should we thus be slaves of the pendulum? 
Why should we not look at these vast varia- 
tions of taste more widely, and, as it were, 
astronomically, to borrow Thoreau's phrase? 
In the mind of a healthy child there is no in- 
congruity between fairy tales and the RoUo 
Books ; and he passes without disquiet from the 
fancied heart-break of a tin soldier to »Tonas 
mending an old rat-trap in the barn. Perhaps, 
after all, the literary fluctuation occurs equally in 
their case and in ours, but under different con- 
ditions. It may be that, in the greater mobil- 
ity of the child's nature, the pendulum can 
swing to and fro in half a second of time and 
without the consciousness of effort ; while in the 
case of older readers, the same vibration takes 
half a century of time and the angry debate of 
a thousand journals. 



THE EVOLUTION OF AN AMERICAN 221 

XXVTT 

THE EVOLUTION OF AN AMERICAN 

Tj^MERSON once wrote, " We go to Europe 
to be Americanized." In the recent Corre- 
spondence of John Lotliroj) Motley — the most 
attractive series of letters which the present 
writer has for many a day encountered — the 
most interesting feature, after all, is the gradual 
evolution of an American. Wendell Phillips 
used to delight in testifying to the manner in 
which this process went on in this his classmate 
and friend, and also in himself. Both came out 
of Harvard College, Phillips said, tlie narrow 
aristocrats of a petty sphere ; both — though 
he did not say this — handsome, elegant, 
accomplished, the prime favorites of the small 
but really polished circle of the Boston of that 
day. In case of Phillips, the emancipation was 
more rapid ; and he too owed it in a sense to 
Europe, for it was there he met his future wife, 
throuofh whom he first became interested in the 
anti-slavery movement. In Motley's case the 



222 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

change came more slowly, and reached its crisis 
at the outbreak of the Civil War : and it must 
have been at the time of his arrival in this 
country in 1861 that he met Pliillips with tlie 
ardent exclamation, as the latter used to repeat 
it, " Phillips, you were right, and I was 
wrong ! " Tliis may, however, have been when 
he visited home in 1858, for his dissatisfaction 
with the pro-slavery tendency of public affairs 
was manifest as early as 1855.^ 

I can remember well my first impression of 
Motley and his friend and afterward brother-in- 
law, Stackpole, as the acknowledged leaders of 
the Boston society of which I had an occasional 
boyish glimpse ; and the glamour of youth still 
remains strong enough to make it impossible for 
me to believe that any drawing-room was ever 
ruled by more elegant and distinguished men. 
There was a younger brother — nearer my own 
age — Preble Motley, who was an athlete as 
well as an Antinous, and hence doubly the idol 
of his compeers ; and his early death was caused, 
in the traditions of that time, by a too daring 
excess in those gymnastic exercises which were 

1 Correspondence, i. 170, 2G8. 



THE EVOLUTION OF AN AMERICAN 223 

just beginning to come into vogue. The elder 
brother was of a more delicate and poetic 
mould ; and it could be said of him, as is said 
of the prophet Mohammed in the Sheeah tradi- 
tions, that " his manners charmed all mankind." 
Hence he found himself readily at home in the 
court society of Vienna, to which he was first 
sent ; and when he was transferred to England, 
he felt keenly the delight at finding, with a 
shade less of elegance in the society around him, 
a recognition which he had not before encoun- 
tered, of purely intellectual claims. Hence we 
find him in the first volume of his letters lavish- 
ing praises on London society, such as he was 
by no means ready to reaffirm after the crucial 
test of our Civil War had been applied. In the 
earlier days, too, he naturally contrasted the 
accumulated intellectual wealth of Europe with 
the comparative poverty of his own land in 
these respects. " When I see here in Europe 
such sums of money spent by the government 
upon every branch of the fine arts, I cannot help 
asking why we at home have no picture-galleries, 
or statue-galleries, or libraries. I cannot see at 
all that such things are only fit for monarchies." ^ 

1 Corresuondence i. 29. 



224 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

This was in his student days in 1833 ; and it 
would now seem less appropriate were it not 
that our barbarous tariff on works of art is still 
continued ; and a later complaint, in 1851, that 
our American rivers are "deaf and dumb" for 
want of literary associations ^ is ra^^idly growing 
obsolete. 

The habitual and still lingering indifference 
of Europeans to all matters in the New World 
had already struck Motley in 1852, at the time 
of Daniel Webster's death, when he found 
scarcely any one on the European continent who 
had ever heard his name, although one literary 
lady had an impression that he was one of our 
principal poets. Nobody in England supposed 
that he was in any way to be ranked with their 
public men — such as Lord Brougham, for 
instance. "The fact is," he adds, "no interest 
is felt in America or American institutions 
among the European public. America is as 
isolated as China. Nobody knows or cares any- 
thing about its men, or its politics, or its condi- 
tions. It is, however, known and felt among 
the lower classes that it is a place to get to out 

1 Correspondence, i. 125. 



THE EVOLUTION OF AN AMERICAN 225 

of the monotonous prison-house of Philistines, 
in which the great unwashed of Europe continue 
to grind eternally. Very little is known of the 
countr}^ and very little respect is felt for it ; but 
the fact remains that Europe is decanting itself 
into America a great deal more rapidly than is 
to be wished by us."* ^ 

While trying to work away on his history 
Motley found himself absorbed not only in our 
great conflict, which made European politics 
seem " pale and uninteresting," but in the 
extraordinary way in which it set at naught all 
European traditions. *' All European ideas are 
turned upside down by the mere statement of 
the proposition which is at the bottom of our 
war. Hitherto 'the sovereignty of the people' 
has been heard in Europe, and smiled at as a 
fiction. . . . But now here comes rebellion 
against our idea of sovereignty, and fact on a 
large scale is illustrating our theoretic fiction." ^ 
In the next letter he uses tliat fine phrase which 
illustrates so much in our early struggles and 
difficulties through that contest : " It is not a 
military war, if such a contradiction can be 

1 Correspondence, i. 147. ^ ibid., ii. 79. 



226 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

used. It is a great political and moral revolu- 
tion, and we are in the first stage of it." ^ This 
was the period of which the English Hayward 
wrote, — the translator of " Faust," — "I passed 
a day Math tlie Motleys at their villa, and found 
him more unreasonable than ever, vowing that 
the restoration of the Union in its entirety was 
as sure as the sun in heaven." It was the 
period of whicli Motley himself afterward wrote, 
"" All English ' society,' except half a dozen 
individuals, was then entirely Southern." 

It was, in short, the opening of that period of 
cleavage between the English and American 
literary classes which still bears its fruit in the 
habits of mind of this generation, and will 
never be forgotten till a new generation has 
wholly taken its place. The fact that the 
literary class especially, which in other coun- 
tries is usually found on the side of progress, 
in this case echoed all tlie sympathies of the 
people of rank, and left only the workingmen 
of England, with a few illustrious exceptions, 
to be our friends — this it was that made Motley 
not merely a patriot, but a man of democratic 

1 Correspondence, ii. 82. 



THE EVOLUTION OF AN AMERICAN 227 

convictions at last. In 1862 he wrote, " I am 
so much of a democrat ; far more than I ever 
was before in my life." ^ Two years later he 
writes, — this man of experience in many courts, 
— "For one, I like democracy. I don't say 
that it is pretty, or genteel, or jolly. But it 
has a reason for existing, and is a fact in 
America, and is founded on the immutable 
principles of reason and justice. Aristocracy 
certainly presents more brilliant social phe- 
nomena, more luxurious social enjoyments. 
Such a system is very cheerful for a few thou- 
sand select specimens out of the few hundred 
millions of the liuman race . . . but what a 
price is paid for it ! " ^ Wlien he wrote this, 
the evolution of an American was complete. 
Who can doubt that if Motley had lived till 
now he would have approached the new and 
even profounder problems developed by another 
quarter of a century with the equipoise and 
the fearlessness that an American should show ? 

1 Correspondence, ii. 77. - Ibid., ii. 193. 



228 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

XXVIII 

A WORLD-LITERATURE 

"FN Eckermann's " Conversations with Goethe " 
that poet is represented as having said, in 
January, 1827, that the time for separate 
national literatures had gone by. " National 
literature,'' he said, " is now a rather unmean- 
ing phrase (ivill jetzt nicht viel sageii) ; the 
epoch of world-literature is at hand (^die Epoche 
der Welt-Literatur 1st an der Zeif), and each one 
must do what he can to hasten its approach." 
Then he points out that it will not be safe to 
select any one literature as affording a pattern 
or model (jnusterhaft') ; or that, if it is, this 
model must necessarily be the Greek. All the 
rest, he thought, must be looked at historically, 
we appropriating from each the best that can be 
employed. 

If this world-literature be really the ultimate 
aim, it is something to know that we are at 
least getting so far as to interchange freely our 
national models. The current London litera- 



A WORLD-LITERATURE 229 

ture is French in its forms and often in its 
frivolity ; while the French critics have lately 
discovered Jane Austen, and are trying to find 
in that staid and exemplary lady the founder of 
the realistic school, and the precursor of Zola. 
Among contemporary novelists, Mr. Howells 
places the Russian first, then the Spanish ; rank- 
ing the English, and even the French, far lower. 
He is also said, in a recent interview, to have 
attributed his own style largely to the influence 
of Heine. But Heine himself, in the preface 
to his " Deutschland," names as his own especial 
models Aristophanes, Cervantes, and Moliere 
— a Greek, a Spaniard, and a Frenchman. 
Goethe himself thinks that we cannot compre- 
hend Calderon without Hafiz, — 

"Nur wer Hafis liebt und kennt 
Weiss was Calderon gesungen, — " 

and Fitzgerald, following this suggestion almost 
literally, translated Calderon first, and then 
Omar Khayyam. Surely, one might infer, the 
era of a world-literature must be approaching. 

Yet in looking over the schedules of our 
American universities, one finds as little refer- 



230 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

ence to a coming world-literature as if no one 
had hinted at the dream. There is an immense 
increase of interest in the study of languages, 
no doubt; and all this prepares for an inter- 
change of national literatures, not for merging 
them in one. The interchange is a good pre- 
liminary stage, no doubt; but the preparation 
for a world-literature must surely lie in the 
study of those methods of thought, those canons 
of literary art, which lie at the foundation of 
all literatures. The thought and its expression, 
— these are the two factors which must solve 
the problem ; and it matters not how much we 
translate — or overset, as the Germans felici- 
tously say — so long as we go no deeper and 
do not grasp at what all literatures have in 
common. Thus in the immense range of 
elective studies at Harvard University there 
are twenty-one distinct coui^ses in Greek, and 
about as many in Latin, English, French, and 
German ; but not a single course among them 
which pertains to a world-literature, or even 
recognizes that these various branches have 
any common trunk. The only sign that looks 
in the slightest degree toward this direction is 



A WORLD-LITEKATURE 231 

the recent appointment of my accomplished 
friend, Mr. Arthur Richmond Marsh, as pro- 
fessor of Comparative Literature. 

No study seems to me to hold less place in 
our universities, as a rule, than that of litera- 
ture viewed in any respect as an art ; all tends 
to the treatment of it as a department of philol- 
ogy on the one side, or of history on the other ; 
and even where it is studied, and training is 
really given in it, it is almost always a training 
that begins and ends with English tradition 
and method. It may call itself " Rhetoric and 
English Composition," but the one of these sub- 
divisions is as essentially English as the other. 
It not only recognizes the English language as 
the vehicle to be used, — which is inevitable, 
— but it does not go behind the English for 
its methods, standards, or illustrations. That 
there is such a thing as training in thought and 
literary expression, quite apart from all national 
limitations — this may be recognized here and 
there in the practice of our colleges, but very 
rarely in their framework and avowed method. 

And, strange to say, this deficiency, if it be 
one, has only been increased by the increased 



232 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

differentiation and specialization of our higher 
institutions. Whatever the evils of the old 
classical curriculum, it had at least this merit, 
that it included definite instruction in the fun- 
damental principles of literature as literature. 
So long as young men used to read Quintilian 
and Aristotle, although they may have missed 
much that was more important, they retained 
the conception of a literary discipline that went 
behind all nationalities ; that was neither an- 
cient nor modern, but universal. I heartily 
believe, for one, in the introduction of the 
modern elective system ; what I regret is that, 
in this general breaking-up and rearranging, 
the preparation for a world-literature has been 
so neglected. If Goethe's view is correct, — 
and who stands for the modern world if Goethe 
does not? — then no one is fitted to give the 
higher literary training in our colleges who has 
not had some training in world-literature for 
himself, who does not know something of 
Calderon through knowing something of Hafiz. 
And observe that Goethe liimself is com- 
pelled to recognize the fact that in this world- 
literature, whether we will or no, Ave must 



A WORLD-LITERATURE 233 

recognize the exceptional position of the Greek 
product. In this respect " we are not con- 
fronted by a theory, but by a condition." The 
supremacy of the Greek in sculpture is Jiot 
more unequivocal than in literature ; and the 
two arts had this in common, that the very 
language of that race had the texture of marble. 
To treat this supremacy as something acci- 
dental, like the long theologic sway of the 
Hebrew and Chaldee, is to look away from a 
world-literature. It is as if an ambitious sculp- 
tor were to decide to improve his studio by 
throwing his Venus of Milo upon the ash-heap. 
There is no accident about art: what is great 
is great, and the best cannot be permanently 
obscured by the second best. 

At the recent sessions of the " Modern Lan- 
guage Association," in Cambridge, Mass., al- 
though all the discussions were spirited and 
pointed, it seemed to me that the maturest 
and best talk came from those who showed that 
they had not been trained in the modern lan- 
guages alone. The collective literature of the 
world is not too wide a study to afford the 
requisite foundation for an ultimate world-lit- 



234 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 

erature ; and surely the nations which have 
brought their product to the highest external 
perfection need to be studied the most. It 
seems safe to rest on two propositions which 
seem irrefutable : first, that all advances towards 
a world-literature must be based on principles 
which have formed the foundation of every 
detached literature ; and secondly, that these 
principles are something apart from the laws of 
science or invention or business, and not less 
Avorthy than these of life-long study. It was 
the supremely practical Naj)oleon Bonaparte 
who placed literature above science, as contain- 
ing above all things the essence of human intel- 
lect. '•'•J'aime les sciences math e mat i que s et 
physiques ; chacime d'elles est une belle applica- 
tion partielle de V esprit humain ; mais les lettres^ 
c^est V esprit Jmmain lui-meme ; cest V education 
de Vdme."" 



INDEX 



About, Edmond, 82. 

Addison, Joseph, 119, 196. 

^schylus, 16, 99, 171. 

Agassiz, Louis, 177. 

Ainswortli, W. H., 94. 

Albert, Prince, 28. 

Albion newspaper, the, 64. 

Aldrich, T. B., 67, 102. 

Alford, Henry, 57, 94. 

American, an, evolution of, 221. 

American Civil War, literary in- 
fluence of, 65. 

American press, as viewed by 
Irving, 2. 

Americanism, Englisii standard 
of, 20. 

Andersen, H. C, 214. 

Anglomania, origin of, 64. 

Anti-slavery agitation, literary 
influence of, 66. 

Apologies, unnecessary, 120. 

Archer, the joclcey, 205. 

Ariosto, Lodovico, 187. 

Aristophanes, 99, 229. 

Aristotle, 174, 232. 

Arnold, Sir Edwin, 106, 110. 

Arnold, Matthew, .3,5, 19, 20, 21, 
22, 35, 38, 46, 91, 123, 195, 206, 
208. 

Austen, Jane, 10, 15, 219, 229. 

Austin, Henry, 101. 

Austin, Sarah, 144. 

B. 

Background, the need of a, 113. 
Bacon, Lord, 114, 175. 
Bailey, P. J., 57. 
Bain, Alexander, 202. 
Balzac, H. de, 114. 
Bancroft, George, 107, 155. 
Bancroft, H. H., 172. 
Barlcer, Lemuel, 184. 
Bartlett, J. R., 216. 



Beaconsfleld, Lord, 110, 167, 179, 

180. 
Beecher, H. W., 60. 
Besant, Walter, 74. 
" Bigelow," 54. 
Billings, Josh, 59. 
Black, William, 202. 
Bhiine, J. G., 110. 
Blake, William, 218. 
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 28, 52, 109, 

188, 234, 
Book catalogue, a Westminster 

Abbey, 152. 
Boston, the, of Emerson's day, 62. 
Boyesen, H. H., 141, 171. 
Bremer, Fredrika, 57. 
Bridaine, Jacques, 215. 
Jiroughara, Henrv, 224. 
Brown, Charles Brockden, 51. 
Brown, John, 16, 155. 
Brown, J. Brownlee, 104. 
Browning, Robert, 25, 54, 55, 98, 

196. 
Brvant, W. C, 100, 147. 
Bryce, James, 120, 167, 211. 
Bu'lwer, see Lytton. 
Buutline, Ned, 199, 200. 
Burroughs, John, 114. 
Burton, Robert, 114. 
Byron, Lord, 178, 195, 217. 



Cable, G. W., 11, 67. 
Culiot, J. E., 175. 
Calderou, Seratin, 229, 2-32. 
Carlvle, Thomas, 37, 56, 197, 206, 

217. 
Casanova, Jacques, 41. 
Catullus, 99. 

Cervantes, Miguel de, 229. 
( hamplain, Samuel de, 192. 
(liiiuning, E. T., 94 
<'hauning, Walter, 214. 
Chauning, W. E., 46, 66, 155. 
Channing.W.E. (of Concord), 103. 



235 



236 



INDEX 



Chaucer, Geoffrey, 179. 

Cherbuliez, Victor, 79. 

Chapelain, J., 91. 

Chaplin, H. VV., 76. 

Chicago Anarchists, the, 68. 

Choate, Kufus, 21-3. 

Cicero, M. T., 4, 1.3, 16, 171. 

City life, limitations of, SO. 

Claverhouse, Earl of, 47. 

Clemens, S. H., 29, 57. 

Cleveland, Grover, 110. 

Cobb, Sylvauus, 199, 200. 

Coleridge, .S. T., 197, 215, 217. 

College education, value of, 113. 

Comte, Auguste, ,32. 

Contemporaneous posterity, a, 51. 

Conway, M. D., 31. 

Cooper, J. F., 58, 62, 155. 

Corneille, Pierre, 92. 

Cosmopolitan standard, a, 43. 

Coster, Jolm, 0. 

Court of England not sought by 
literary men, 74. 

Cousin, Victor, 216. 

Creighton, Dr., .34. 

Cruger, Mrs. Julie (Julien Gor- 
don), 11. 

Crusoe, Robinson, 17. 

D. 

Dante, Alighieri, 48, 114, 185, 186, 

187, 189, 196. 
Darwin, C. R., 29, 49, 124, 125, 137, 

176, 187. 
Dead level, the fear of the, 70. 
Declaration of independence, ap 

plied to literature, 4. 
Delphic oracle, answer of, to 

Cicero, 4. 
Deniostlienes, 69. 
Descartes, Ren6, 71. 
Dickens, Charles, 12, 93, 183, 184, 

206. 
Dickinson, Emily, 16. 
Digby, K. H., 116. 
Donnelly, Ignatius, 175. 
Dime novel, the test of the, 198. 
Disraeli, Benj., see Beaconsfield. 
Drake, Nathan, 187. 
Dryden, John, 195. 
Dukes, acceptance of, 12. 
Doyle, J. A., 33. 

E. 

Eckermann, J. P., 97, 188, 228. 
Edwards, Jonathan, 155. 
Eggleston, Edward, 11. 
Equation of fame, the, 88. 



Eliot, Charles, 174. 

Eliot, George, 200. 

Elliot, Sir Frederick, 78, 167. 

Emerson, R. W., 7, 15, 27, .36, 39, 

42, 46, 49, 54, 63, 66, 71, 92, 100, 

114, 123, 124, 126, 155, 173, 175. 

191, 195, 197, 208, 217, 221. 
English criticism on America, 24. 
English society, influence of, on 

literature, 204, 205. 
Europe, tlie shadow of, 27. 
Evolution, the, of an American, 

221. 
Everett, Edward, 51, 155. 
Ewing, Juliana, 203. 

F. 

Faber, F. W., 94. 
Fame, tlie equation of, 88. 
Farmers, American, 75. 
Feltou,C. C, 90, 174. 
Fields. J. T.,51. 
Firdousi, 186. 
Fiske, Willard, 172, 185. 
Fitzgerald, P. H., 229. 
Fontenelle, Bernard de, 86. 
Fuller, M. F., see Ossoli. 
F'uller, TJiomas, 93. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 5, 63, 155, 
Francis, Philip, 190. 
Frederick II., 83. 
Freeman, E. A., 168. 
Froude, J. A., 116, 158, 203. 



Garfield, J. A., 111. 
Garrison, W. L.,49, 62. 
George IV., 111. 
Giants, concerning, 185. 
Gilder, K. W., 113. 
Gladstone, W. E., 110, 167. 
Goethe, J. W., 6, 17, 48, 66, 90, 97, 
179, 182, 188, 189, 228, 229, 233. 
Goodale, G. H., 163. 
Gosse, E. W., 123, 195, 
Gordon, Julien, see Cruger. 
Grant, U. S., 84, 12.3, 155. 
Greeley, Horace, 27. 

H. 

Hatiz, M. S., 229, 232. 

Haggard, Rider, 14, 93, 197, 198, 

202, 205. 
Hale, E. E., 101. 
Hamerton, P. G., 168. 
Hardenberg, Friedricli von, 99. 
Hardy, A. S., 15, 202. 
Haring, John, 0. 



INDEX 



237 



Harte, Bret, 11,57,58. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, SI, 41, fl(>, 

84, 124, 126, 155, 218, 219. 
Hayley, William, 217, 218. 
Hayward Memoirs, the, 82, 226. 
Hazlitt, William, 216. 
Heine, Heiurich, iiO, 10'.t, 142, 15'.>, 

189, 229. 
Hemaiis, F. D., 179. 
High-water marks, conoerning, 

97. 
Hogg, Jame.s, 169. 
Holmes, O. W., 54,62, 67,97,99, 

178, 205. 
Holt, Henry, 172. 
Homer, 48, 98, 114, 169, 171, 190, 

217. 
Horace, 16,48,99, 114. 
Houghton, Lord, 19, 56, 62, 94. 
Howells, W. D., 1.3, 15, 66, 114, 

118, 171, 184, 194,201,202,210, 

229. 
Howei'E. W., 11. 
Howe, Julia Ward, 67, 100. 
Hugo, Victor, 49, 56, 68, 110. 
Humboldt, A. von, 73, 176. 
Humor, American, perils of, 128. 
Hutchinson, Ellen M., 101, 102. 
Huxley, T. H.,137, 158. 



I. 

Ideals, personal, 106. 
Iffland, A.W., 90. 
International copyright law, 122. 
Irving, Washington, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 
20,64,216. 



J. 

Jackson, Andrew, 110. 
Jackson, Helen, 68, 102. 
James, G. P. R.,94. 
James, Henry, 65, 66, 84, 114, 118, 

184. 
Jeflferson, Thomas, 4, 5, 11, 110, 

155. 
Johnson, Samuel, 197. 
Joubert, Joseph, 26, 96, 194, 195. 
Jouffroy, T. S., 216. 
Junius, 190. 

K. 

Keats, John, 86, 103. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 15. 
Kock, Paul de, 56. 
Kotzebue, A. F. von, 90. 
Khayyam, Omar, 229. 



Lafontaine, A. 90. 

La Fontaine, J. de, 92. 

Lamartine, Alphonse, 182. 

Lamb, Charles, 217. 

Landor, W. S., 69, 197, 217. 

Lang, Andrew, 41, 199. 

Lanier, Sidney, 67. 

Lapham, Silas, 164, 184. 

Larousse, Pierre, 54. 

Lawton, W. C, 147. 

Leland, C. G., 151. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 4, 16,67, 84, 

155. 
Literary metropolis. A, 77. 
Literary pendulum. The, 213. 
Literary tonics, 62. 
Liveries, repressive, 75. 
London, the, of to-day, 80, 93. 
Longfellow, H. W., 29, .39, 66, 81, 

93, 100, 155, 215. 
Longueville, Duchesse de, 91. 
Lowell, J. R., 19, 54, 59, 63, 66, 77, 

96, 98, 100, 102, 114, 155, 179, 

205. 
Lubbock, James, 217. 
Lytton, Lord, 179, 180, 181. 182. 

M. 

Macaulav, T. B., 25, 197. 
Madonnas, Emily Dickinson's 

detiuition of, 16. 
Maine, .Sir Henry, 5, .32. 
" 3Iake thv option which of two,'" 

170. 
Marlowe, Christopher, 52. 
Martel, Charles, 209., 
Mason, William, 218. 
3Iatthews, Brander, 12. 
Maturin, C. R., 51. 
JlcCosh, James, 111. 
Menzel, ('. A., 90. 
Metropolis, a literary, 77. 
Millais, J. E.,53. 
Miller, Joaquin, 20. 
Millet, J. F.,53. 
Milnes, see Houghton. 
Mohammed, 109, 223. 
Moliammed and Bonaparte, 109. 
Moliere, J. B. P. de, 92, 186, 229. 
Montagu, Elizabeth. .52. 
Moore, Thomas, 178, 179. 
Morgan, Lady, 59. 
Jlorley, John, 167. 
Morris, William, 68. 
Motley, J. L., 2, 6, 7, 36, 59, 60, 

221. 



238 



INDEX 



Motley, Preble, 222. 
Mozart, \Y. A., 188. 
Mitller, Max, 171. 
Murfree, Mary N., 11, 58. 

N. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 125. 

Newtou, Stuart, •!!). 

New World and New Book, the, 1. 

Nichol, John, 61. 

Niebuhr, B. G., 4. 

Novali.s, see Hardenberg. 

Norton, C. E., 179, ISO, 208. 



O. 



O 



i>li, Margaret Fuller, t), 27, 90, 

iX), 155, 176. 
Ossian, 52. 

Osten-Sacken, Baron, 173. 
Oxenstiern, Chancellor, 8i). 

r. 



Palmer, G. H., Ii8. 
Paris, limitations of, 82. 
Paris, the world's capital, 77. 
Parker, Theodore, 42, 62, 115, 
Parkman, Francis, 60, 61. 
Parton, tfanies, l.'i. 
Pattison, Mark, 50. 
Paul, Jean, see Itichter. 
Pepys, Samuel, 42. 
Perry, Lillali Cabot, 219, 
Petrarch, Francesco, 172, 

185, 186, 187. 
Philip of Burgundy, 6. 
Phillips, Wendell, 7, 49, 62, 

222. 
Plato, 48, 114. 
Plot, the proposed abolition 

135. 
Plutarch, 4, 174. 
Poe, B. A., 66, 155, 190, 219. 
Popkin, J. S., 117, 169, 171, 

174. 
Posterity, a contemporaneous 
Precision, weapons of, 192. 
Prescott, W. H., 59. 



179, 

221, 



172, 
,51. 



Quincy, Edmund, 22. 
Quintilian, 232. 

R. 

Racine, Jean, 92. 
Ramler, C. W., 90. 
Rapliael da Urbino, 188. 
Rainsford, W. S., 79. 



Richter, J. P. F., 182. 
Rollo Books, the, 180. 
Roscoe, William, 216. 
Russell, W. Clark, 202. 
Ruskin, John, 53, 97, 114, 187 197, 

206. 
Rousseau, J. ,1., 179. 

S. 

Sala, G. A., 203. 

Sand, George, 56. 

Scherer, Edniond, 5. 

Schiller, J. C. F. von, 90, 179, 189. 

Scott. Sir Walter, 10, 15, 46, 94. 

Scudder, S. H., 73. 

Self-depreciation, the trick of, 

200. 
Sentimental, decline of the, 178. 
Seward, Anna, 218. 
Shadow of Europe, the, 27. 
Shakespeare, AVilliam, 16, 21, 48, 

52, 186, 188, 189, 191. 
Sliellev, P. B., 190, 
Sheridan, P. H., 47, 123. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 83. 
Slavery, Emerson's poem on, 8. 
Sly, Christopher, 213. 
Sniitli, Goldwin, 3. 
Southey, Robert, 217. 
Spencer, Herbert, 216. 
Spenser, Edmund, 18, 83, 94. 
Spoflbrd, Harriet P., 102. 
Stackpole, J. L., 222. 
Stedniau, E. C, 62, 67, 100. 
Sterling, John, 56,94. 
Stevenson, R. L., 65. 
St. Nichohis magazine, riddles in, 

23. 
Stockton. F. R., 219. 
Stoddard, R. H., 67. 
Stowe, H. B., 57, 58, 66, 68. 
Sumner, Charles, 70, 155. 
Sumner, W. G., 19. 
Swinburne, A. C, 68, 158. 

T. 

Taine, H. A., 53. 

Taking ourselves seriously, on, 

.35. 
Talleyrand, C. M., 193. 
Tasso, Torquato, 187, 217. 
Taylor, Bavard, 67, 100. 
Taylor, Sir'Henry, 78, 167. 
Taylor, Tliomas, 215. 
Temperament, an American, 2. 
Tennyson, Lord, 25, 29, 63, 56, 94, 

95, 98, 124, 126, 184, 196, 203, 

205. 



INDEX 



239 



Test of the dime novel, the, 198. 
Thackeray, W. M., 93, 111. 
Thomas, Isaiah, 42. 
Thompson, Maurice, 67. 
Thoreau, li. D., vi., 9, 16, 73, 90, 

114, 155,175, 220. 
Ticknor, (Jeorge, 19. 
Tocqueville, A. C. H. de, .32, 121. 
Tolstoi, Count Leo, 35. 
Tonics, literary, 62. 
Touclistone quoted, 21. 
Tourguenett', Ivan, 219. 
Town and gown, 161. 
Tracy, Uriah, 46. 
Transcendental school, the, 8. 
Translators, American, 144. 
Travers, W. U., S2. 
Trench, R. C, 57. 
Trollope, Frances, 24. 
Tupper, M. F., 98. 
Twain, Mark, see Clemens. 
Tyndall, John, 22. 

U, V. 

Urquhart, David, 208, 209. 

Vestris, M.,83. 

Virgil, 99, 171, 217. 

Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 52, 53, 83, 

187, 189 
Von Hoist, H. E., .32. 

W. 

Wagner, Richard, 16. 
Wallace, H. B., 51. 



Wallace, Lew, 67. 
Walpole, Horace, 1.35, 210. 
Walton, Izaak, 202. 
Walworth, M. T., 198, 200. 
Ward, Artemus, 59. 
Warner, C. D., 2. 72. 
Wasliington, George, 112, 155. 
Wasson, D. A., v., 103. 
Weapons of precision, 192. 
Webb, R. D., 29. 
Webster, Daniel, 155, 224. 
Weiss, Jolin, 104. 
Weller, Sam, 182. 
Westminster Abbey of a book 

catalogue, 152. 
White, J. Blanco, 98. 
Wliitman, Walt, 58, 67, 100. 
Wliittier, J. G., 25, 60, 62, 66. 
Wieland, C. M., 90. 
Wilde, Oscar, 93. 
William the Silent, 6. 
Willis, N. P., 27, 28, 29, 93. 
Wilkins, Mary E., 11. 
Winsor, .Justin, 172. 
Wolfe, (jeneral, 103. 
Wolseley, Lord, 123. 
Wordsworth, William, 94, 217. 
World-literature, a, 228. 

Zelter, C. F., 97. 
Ziucke, Canon, 39. 
Zola, Emile, 56, 229. 



T HOMAS W, HIGGINSON'S yyORK 

TRAVELLERS AND OUTLAWS- EnsoDEs in Amehican 

HiSTOUY. 12mo, $1.50. 

" Apart from their historical value, these sketches have all the delight 
ful qualities of Colouel Higginsou's literary style." 
OUT-DOOR PAPERS. 16mo. $1.50. 

"That wise and gracious Bible of physical education." — Professol 
M. C. Tyler, in Bruu-ncUJe Paperx. 

" The chapters ou ' Water Lilies,' ' The Life of Birds,' and ' The Pro- 
cession of Flowers,' are charming specimens of a poetic faculty in de 
scriptiou, combined with a scientitic observation and analysis of nature." 

— London Patriot. 

xVCALBONE: AN OLDPORT ROMANCE. lG.no. $1..J0. 

" As a ' ron^ince,' it seems to us the most brilliant that has appeai'ed in 
this country since Hawthorne (whom the author in some points has the 
happiness to resemble) laid down the most fascinating pen eyer held by 
an American author." — John G. !Saxe. 

ARMY LIFE IN A BLACK REGIMENT. 16mo. $1.50. 
"His narratives of his works and adventures, in 'The Atlantic Monthly,' 
attracted general attention by their graphic humor and their picturesque 
and poetical descriptions." — London Spectator. 

ATLANTIC ESSAYS. 16mo. $1.50. 

"A book which will most assuredly help to raise the standard of 
American literature. Mr. Higgiuson's own style is, after Hawthorne's, 
the best which America has yet produced. He possesses simplicity, di- 
rectness, and grace. We must strongly recommend this voluiae of 
essays, not to be merely read, but to be studied. It is as sound in sub. 
stance as it is graceful in expression." — Westmhiater Revieio. 

OLDPORT DAYS. With 10 heliotype illustrations. 16mo. $1.50. 
" Mr. Higginsou's ' Oldport Days ' have an indescribable charm. The 
grace a'jd refinement of his style are exquisite. His stories are pleasant; 
his i)rjture8 of children, and his talk about them, are almost pathetic in 
the'i tenderness; but in his descriptions of nature he is without a rival." 

— Boston Daily Adnt'rtixi'f. 

COMMON SENSE ABOUT WOMEN. 16mo. $1.50. 

" A thoroughly good and practical book, from the pen and heart of 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson. If one of its short chapters could be 
read aloud every day during the year, in the millions of homes in the 
land, its power for good could scarcely be overestimated." — Chicago 
Inter-Ocean. 

YOUNG POLKS' HISTORY OF THE UNITED 
STATES. Square lOmo. With maps and over 100 illustrations. 
$1.50. 
" This book is for American youth what Dickens's ' History of Eng- 
land ' is for the children of our cousins beyond the sea. Like it, it is so 
clear and charmingly written, that it is scarcely fair to call it a ' Young 
Folks' History;' for we are sure that the old as well as the young will 
read it. Members of the C. L. S. C. may take it, instead of the book re- 
quired, if they so desire." — J. H. Vincent, D.D., President Chautauqua 
Literary and Scientific Circle. 

/OUNG FOLKS' BOOK OF AMERICAN EXPLOR- 
ERS. Illustrated. Kimo. $1.50. 

SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. Small 
quarto. 50 cents. 

WENDELL PHILLIPS. Contributed to "The Nation" by T 
W. Higginson. 4to. Taper. 25 cents. 

THE MONARCH OF DREAMS. Cloth. 50 cents. 

HINTS ON WRITING AND SPEECH MAKING 

(Jloth. 50 cents. 

S9id by all booksellers, or sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt ofprieb 

LEE AND SHEPARO. Publishers. Boston. 



[ RERE E. J EROME'S .... 
i ...... . ^Rj goOKS 

IN A FAIR COUNTRY. With 55 full-page illustrations; en- 
graved by Andrew. Nearly 100 pages of text, by Thomas Wentworth 
Higginson. Gold cloth, t'ull gilt, $6.00; Turkey morocco, $15.00; 
tree calf, $15.00; English seal style, $10.00. 

Miss Jerome has cauglit the very glamour of the woodland and the lea 
with her pencil, transferring it to p.iper with the delicacy of an exquisite 
photograph, while Colonel iligginson's delightful style brings out the 
beauty of His topics most satistactorily. As a specimen of the book- 
maker's art, the volume leaves nollimg to be asked. 

A BUNCH OF VIOLETS. Original illustrations, engraved on 
wood and printed under the direction of George T. Andrew. 410, cloth, 
$3-75- Turkey morocco, $9.00; tree calf, $9.00; English seal style, $7.00. 
The new volume is akin to the former triumphs of this favorite artist, whose 
" Sketch Books" have achieved a popularity unequalled in the history of fine 
art publications. In the profusion of designs, originality, and delicacy of 
treatment, the charming sketches of mountain, meadow, lake, and forest 
scenery of New England here reproduced are unexcelled. After the wealth of 
illustration which this student of nature has poured into the lap of art, to pro- 
duce a volume in which there is no deterioration of power or beauty, but, if 
possible, mcreased strength and enlargement of ideas, gives assurance that the 
^remost female artist in .America will hold the hearts of her legion of admirers. 

NATURE'S HALLELUJAH. Presented in a series of nearly 

fifty full-page original illustrations (g% x 14 inches), engraved on wood by 

George T. Andrew. Elegantly bound in gold cloth, full gilt, gilt edges, 

$6.00; Turkey morocco, $15.00; tree calf, $15.00; English seal style, $10.00. 

This volume has won the most cordial praise on both sides of the water. 

Mr. Francis H. Underwood, U. S. Consul at Glasgow, writes concerning it: 

" I have never seen anything superior, if equal, to the delicacy and finish of 

the engravings, and the perfection of the press-work. The copy you sent me 

has been looked over with evident and unfeigned delight by many people of 

artistic taste. Every one frankly says, ' It is impossible to produce such 

effects here,' and, whether it is possible or not, I am sure it is noi done ; no 

such effects are produced on this side of the Atlantic. In this combination of 

art and workmanship, the United States leads the world; and you have a right 

to be proud of the honor of presenting such a specimen to the public " 

ONE YEAR'S SKETCH BOOK. Containing forty-six full- 
page original illustrations, engraved on wood by Andrew; in same bindings 
and at same prices as " Nature's Hallelujah." 

" Every thick, creamy page is embellished by some gems of art. Sometimes 
it is but a dash and a few trembling strokes; at others an impressive landscape, 
but in all and through all runs the master touch. Miss Jerome has the genius 
of an Angelo, and the e.vecution of a Guido. The beauty of the sketches will 
be apparent to all, having been taken from our unrivalled New England 
scenery." — IVashington Chronicle. 

THE MESSAGE OF THE BLUEBIRD, Told to Me 

to Tell to Others. Original illustrations engraved on wood by 
Andrew. Cloth and gold, $2.00; palatine boards, ribbon ornaments, $1.00. 
" In its new bindings is one of the daintiest combinations of song and illus- 
tration ever published, exhibiting in a marked degree the fine poetic taste and 
wonderfully artistic touch which render this author's works so popular. The 
pictures are exquisite, and the verses exceedingly graceful, appealing to the 
highest sensibilities. The little volume ranks among the choicest of holiday 
souvenirs, and is beautiful and pleasing." — Boston Transcript. 



Sold by all booksellers, and sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of priot 

LEE AND SHEFAED Publishers Boston 



|^|ARRAT1VE8 



OF NOTED- 



■TRAVELLERS 



GERMANY SEEN WIT^HOUT SPECTACLES; or, Random 
Sketches of Various Subjects, Penned from Different Stand- 
points in the Empire , , , , ^ ,, , 
By Henry Ruggles, late United States Consul at the Island of Malta, and 
at Barcelona, Spain. $1.50. . 

" Mr. Ruggles writes briskly: he chats and gossips, slashing right and lel( 
with stout American prejudices, and has made withal a most entertaining 
book.'' — JVew- ] 'ar/c Tribune. 
TRAVELS AND OBSERVATSONS IN THE ORIENT, with = 

Hasty Flight in the Countries of Europe 
By Walter Hakriman (ex-Governor of New Hampshire). $i.5o_. 

" The author, in his graphic description of these sacred localities, refers 
with great aptness to scenes and personages whichhistory has made famous 
It is a chatty narrative of travel." — Concord Monitor. 

FORE AND AFT ^ ^ ,,r. * 

A Story of Actual Sea-Life. By Robert B. Dixon, M.D. $1.25. 

Travels in Mexico, with vivid descriptions of manners and customs, form a 
large part of this striking narrative of a fourteen-months' voyage. 
VOYAGE OF THE PAPER CANOE 
A Geographical Journey of Twenty-five Hundred Miles from Quebec to tha 

Gulf of Mexico. By Nathaniel H. BiSHOP. With numerous illustra- 

tions and maps specially prepared for this work. Crown 8vo. $1.50 

" Mr. Bishop did a very bold thing, and has described it with a happy 
mixture of spirit, keen observation, and bonlwviii-." — London Graphic. 
FOUR MONTHS IN A SNEAK-BOX ,,.... 

A Boat Voyage of Twenty-six Hundred Miles down the Ohio and Mississippi 

Rivers, and along the Gulf of Mexico. By Nathaniel H. Bishop. With 

numerous maps and illustrations. $1.50. 

"His glowing pen-pictures of ' shanty-boat' life on the great rivers ars 
true to life. His descriptions of persons and places are graphic." — Zw«'j 
Herald. 
A THOUSAND MILES' WALK ACROSS SOUTH AMERICA, 

Over the Pampas and the Andes 
By Nathaniel H. Bishop. Crown 8vo. New edition. lUnstrated. $1.50. 

" Mr. Bishop made this journey when a boy of sixteen, has never forgotten 
it, and tells it in such a way that the reader will always remember it, and 
wish there had been more." 

CAMPS IN THE CARIBBEES . . , „, t .• t , j 

Being the Adventures of a Naturalist Bird-hunting in the West-India Islands, 

By Fred A. Oher. New edition. With maps and illustrations. $1.50. 

" During two years he visited mountains, forests, and people, that few, if 
«ny, tourists had ever reached before. He carried his camer:\ with hini, and 
photographed from nature the scenes by which the book is illustrated. - 
Loiiisville Courier-Journal. 
ENGLAND FROM A BACK WINDOW; With Views oi> 

Scotland and Ireland 
By J. M. Bailey, the "' Danbury News Man. lamo. $1.00. 

" The peculiar humor of this writer 'j well known. The BriCish Isles have 
never before been looked at in just the same way, — at least, not by any ono 
who has notified us of the icci Mr. Bailey's travels possess, accordingly, a 
value of their own for the reader, no matter how many previous records ot 
journeys in the mother -.ountry he may have read." — Rochester Express. 

Bold by all booksellers, and sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of pric 

LEE AND SHEPAR© Publishers Boston 



B RIGHT D OOKS OF TRAVEL 
REEZY ^~^ - - BY SIX BRIGHT WOMEN - - - - 



A WINTER IN CENTRAL AMERICA AND MEXICO 

By Helen J. Sanborn. Cloth, $1.50. 

" A bright, attractive narrative by a wide-awake Boston girl." 

A SUMMER IN THE AZORES, with a Glimpse of Madeira 

By Miss C. Alice Baker. Little Classic style. Cloth, gilt edges, $1.25. 
" Miss Baker gives us a breezy, entertaining description of these picturesque 

islands. She is an observing traveller, and makes a graphic picture of the 

quaint people and customs." — Chicago Advance. 

LIFE AT PUGET SOUND 

With sketches of travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregoh_ 
and California. By Caroline C. LiiiGHTON. i6mo, cloth, $1.50. 
" Your chapters on Paget Sound have charmed me. Full of life, deeply 

interesting, and with just that class of facts, and suggestions of truth, that 

cannot fail to help the Indian and the Chinese." — Wendell Phillips. 

EUROPEAN BREEZES 

By Margery Deane. Cloth, gilt top, $1.50. Being chapters of travel 
through Germany, .Austria, Hungary, and Switzerland, covering places not 
usually visited by Americans in making " the Grand Tour of the Conti- 
nent," by the accomplished writer of " Newport Breezes." 
" A very bright, fresh and amusing account, which tells us about a tost of 

things \is never heard 01 before, and is worth two ordmary books of European 

travel." — Woman's Journal. 

BEATEN PATHS ; or, A Woman's Vacation in Europe 

By Ella W. Thompson. i6mo, cloth. $1.50. 

A lively and chatty book of travel, with pen-pictures humorous and graphic, 
that are decidedly out of the " beaten paths " of description. 
AN AMERICAN GIRL ABROAD 
By Miss Adeline Trafton, author of " His Inheritance," " Katherine 

Earle," etc. i6mo. Illustrated. $1.50. 

" A sparkling account of a European trip by a wide-awake, intelligent, and 
irrepressible American girl. Pictured with a freshness and vivacity that is 
delightful." — Vtica Observer. 

CURTIS GUILD'S TRAVELS 
BRITONS AND MUSCOVITES; or, Traits of Two Empires 

Cloth, $2.00. 

OVER THE OCEAN; or. Sights and Scenes in Foreign Lands 

By Curtis GtJiLD, editor of " The Boston Commercial Bulletin ' '>own 8vo. 

Cloth, $2.50. 

" The utmost that any European tourist can hope to do is to tell the olc' 
story in a somewhat fresh way, and Mr. Guild has succeeded in every part of 
his book in doing this." — Philailelphia Bulletin. 
ABROAD AGAIN; or, Fresh Forays in Foreign Fields 
Uniform with " Over the Ocean." By the same author. Crown 8vo. 

Cloth, .$2.50. 

" He has given us a life-picture. Europe is done in a style that must serve 
as an invaluable guide to tho.se who go ' over the ocean,' as well as an inter- 
eatiag companion." — Halifax Citiztn. 

^nrd by all booksellers, and sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price 

LEE AND SHEPARD Publishers Boston 



UISTORICAL ROOKS * * * . 

. * * * FOR yOUNG PEOPLE 



You n g Folks' Histo r y of the United St a tes 

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Illustrated. $1.50. 

The story of our country in the most reliable and interesting form. As a 
story-book it easily leads all other American history stories in interest, while as 
a te.\t-book for the study of history it is universally admitted to he the best. 

Young Folks' Book o f American Explorers 

fiy Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Uniform with the " Young Folks' 
History of the United States." One volume, fully illustrated. Price $1.50. 
" It is not a history told in the third person, nor an historical novel for young 
folks, where the author supposes the chief characters to have thought and said 
such and such things under such and such circumstances; but it is the genuine 
description given by the persons who experienced the things they described in 
letters written home." — Mo7itpelier Jozirtial. 

The Nation in a. Nutshell 



By George Makepeace Towle, author of " Heroes of History," " Young 
Folks' History of England," " Young Folks' History of Ireland," etc. 
Price 50 cents. 

" To tell the story of a nation like ours in a nutshell, requires a peculiar 
faculty for selecting, condensing, and philosophizing. The brevity with which 
he relates the principal events in American history, Joes not detract from the 
charming interest of the narrative style." — Pjiblic Opinion. 

Young People's History of England 

By George Makepeace Towle. Cloth, illustrated. $1.50. 

" The whole narrative is made interesting and attractive — in every way 
what a book of this kind should be in its clearness of statement, freshness of 
style, and its telling of the right ways." — Critic. 

Handbook of English History 

Based on " Lectures on English History," by the late M. J. Guest, and 
brought down to the year 1880. With a Supplementary Chapter on the 
English Literature of the 19th Century. By V. H. Underwood, LL.D. 
With Maps, Chronological Table, etc. $1.50. 
" It approaches nearer perfection than anything in the line we have seen. 

It is succinct, accurate, and delightful." — Hartford Evening Post. 

Youn g People's History of Ireland 

By George Makepeace Towle, author of " Young People's History of 

England," " Young Folk.;' Heroes of History," etc. With an introduction 

by John Boyle O'Reilly. Cloth, illustrated. $1.50^ 

" The history is like a novel, increasing in interest to the very end, and 

terminating at the most interesting period of the whole; and the reader lays 

down the book a moment in enthusiastic admiration for a people who have 

endured so much, and yet have retained so many admirable characteristics." ^ 

A^.F. IVorld. 



Sold by all boohsellers, and sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of prioe 

LEE AND SHEFAKD Publishers Boston 



E 



"^NGLISH AS IT SHOULD 



BE WRITTEN 



Handbooks for 

All Lovers of Correct 

Language 



NEATLY BOUND IN CLOTH, 50 CENTS EACH. 

MISTAKES IN WRITING ENGLISH AND HOW TO AVOID THEM 

For the use of all who teach, write, or speak the language. By Marshall 
T. BiGELOW, author of "Punctuation." 

PUNCTUATION AND OTHER TYPOGRAPHICAL MATTERS 

For the use of Printers, Authors, Teachers and Scholars. By Marshall 
T. Bigelow, Corrector at the University Press, Cambridge. 

1000 BLUNDERS IN ENGLISH 

A Handbook of Suggestions in Reading and Speaking. By Harlan H. 
Ballard, A. M., Principal of Lenox Academy, Lenox, Mass. 

HANDBOOK OF CONVERSATION 

Its Faults and its Graces. Compiled by Andrew P. Peabodv, D.D., 
LL.D. Containing Dr. Peabody's Address, Mr. Trench's Lecture, 
Mr. Parry Gwynne's "A Word to the Wise," and " Mistakes and 
Improprieties of Reading and Writmg Corrected." 

ENGLISH SYNONYMS DISCRIMINATED 

By Rev. Richard Whatelv, D.D., the Archbishop of Dublin. 

SOULE Si CAMPBELL'S PRONOUNCING HANDBOOK 

. Of Words often mispronounced, and of words as to which a Choice of 
Pronunciation is allowed. 3,000 mistakes in Pronunciation corrected. 

CAMPBELL'S HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH SYNONYMS 

With an Appendix showing the Correct Uses of Prepositions. 

HINTS ON LANGUAGE 

In connection with Sight Reading and Writing in Primary and Inter- 
mediate Schools. By S. Arthur Bent, A.M. 

FORGOTTEN MEANINGS 

Or, An Hour with the Dictionary. By Alfred Waitks, author of 
" Student's Historical Manual." 

SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS 

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson, author of "Young Folks' History 
of the United States," " Outdoor Papers," etc. 

HINTS ON WRITING AND SPEECH-MAKING 

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 

UNIVERSAL PHONOGRAPHY 

Or, Shorthand by the " Allen Method." Self instructive. By G. G. 
Allen, Principal of the Allen Stenographic Institute, Boston. 

PENS AND TYPES: or Hints and Helps. New edition, $1 25 

For those who write, print, read, teach, or learn. Ev Benjamin Drew. 

Sold by all booksellers, and sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt 
of price 

LEE AND SHEPARO PUBLISHERS BOSTON 



